Angela Sims
President, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School; President, American Academy of Religion (2027).
The Reverend Angela D. Sims, Ph.D. is the 13th and first woman President of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School (CRCDS), where she also serves as the John Price Crozer Professor of Social Ethics.
Prior to joining CRCDS on July 1, 2019, Dr. Sims served as Vice President of Institutional Advancement and Robert B. and Kathleen Rogers Professor in Church and Society at Saint Paul School of Theology in Leawood, KS. She holds a Ph.D. in Christian Social Ethics from Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, VA. Prior to matriculation at Union, Dr. Sims completed a baccalaureate degree summa cum laude at Trinity College (Trinity Washington University) and a Master of Divinity with honors at Howard University School of Divinity.
Dr. Sims’s research examines connections between faith, race, and violence with specific attention to historical and contemporary ethical implications of lynching and a culture of lynching in the United States. Principal investigator for an oral history project, “Remembering Lynching: Strategies of Resistance and Visions of Justice,” her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Womanist Scholars Program at the Interdenominational Theological Center, the Louisville Institute, the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, and the Institute for Oral History at Baylor University. She is the author of Lynched: The Power of Memory in a Culture of Terror and Ethical Complications of Lynching: Ida B. Wells’s Interrogation of American Terror; co-editor of Walking through the Valley: Womanist Explorations in the Spirit of Katie Geneva Cannon and Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader; and lead author of Religio-Political Narratives in the United States: From Martin Luther King, Jr. through Jeremiah Wright.
An ordained Baptist clergywoman and active member and contributor to several academic guilds and faith-based community organizations, Dr. Sims takes seriously the prophetic imperative “to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God”.