Serene Jones

The Rev. Dr. Serene Jones became the sixteenth president of Union Theological Seminary, an independent, multi-denominational seminary founded in 1836. On July 1, 2009, Dr. Jones became the first woman president in the Seminary's 172-year history. She is the Roosevelt Professor of Systematic Theology.

Previously the Titus Street Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School, Dr. Jones comes to Union after seventeen years on the Yale University faculty, where she also served as chair and faculty member of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Jones has held faculty appointments at Yale Law School and in the Department of African American Studies and Religious Studies.

Dr. Jones is a prolific and popular scholar in the fields of theolgoy, religion and gender studies. In addition to publishing 37 articles and book chapters since 1991, she has delivered a long list of professional papers and public lectures across the United States and around the world. She is the author of Feminist Theory and Theology: Cartographies of Grace (2000) and Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety (1995). She co-edited Feminist and Womanist Essays in Reformed Dogmatics (2006), Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Engagement with Classical Themes (2005), Liberating Eschatology: Essays in Honor of Letty Russell (1999), and Setting the Table: Women in Theological Conversation (1995).

Dr. Jones earned her M.Div. from Yale Divinity School (1985) as well as her Ph.D. in theology from Yale University (1991). She holds a B.A. from the University of Oklahoma (1981) and is an ordained minister in both the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ.

Dr. Jones is the recipient of numerous awards and honors. She has received grants from the Pew Scholars and the Louisville Institute and was co-principal investigator on the "Women, Religion, and Globalization Grant" for the Henry T. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs. From 1996-2006, she served on the advisory board of the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Religion and Theology at Wabash College in Indiana, and from 1999 to 2005 she co-convened the Constructive Theology Workgroup, a national organization of progressive theologians.