Academic Seminar – 22nd May // Dr. Priscilla Pope-Levison & Dr. Jack Levison // The Scots-Irish Presbyterianism of American Woman’s Rights Advocate and Biblical Interpreter, Elizabeth Birch Wilson

Academic seminars focus on early-stage research on questions at the intersection of Christian faith and scholarly enquiry. They are intended to be exploratory, generative for both presenter and participants, and accessible across disciplines.

This groundbreaking analysis of the Presbyterian influence embedded in Elizabeth Wilson’s A scriptural view of woman’s rights and duties in all the important relations of life (1849), commences, not in pages of published history or modern scholarship, but with a newspaper’s marriage record, infant son’s gravestone, census report, and Irish family’s genealogy record. These snatches of archival history coalesce to reveal Wilson’s Scots-Irish Presbyterian faith passed down from her father, Ulster Presbyterian minister, Thomas Ledlie Birch. Presbyterian hermeneutics and polity provide the central framework of nineteenth-century America’s most comprehensive scriptural view of woman’s rights penned by a woman.

Dr. Priscilla Pope-Levison:

Priscilla Pope-Levison is Research Professor of Practical Theology at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. Her published areas of research—nine books and more than 30 articles, dictionary entries, and chapters—include women’s religious history, contextual theology, missiology, evangelism, and ecumenism. Her most recent book, No Man’s Land: The International Methodist Deaconess Movement, 1874-1918, received the Smith/Wynkoop Book Award from the Wesleyan Theological Society. Priscilla, a United Methodist minister, has worked as a pastor in the local church, as a college chaplain, college and seminary professor, and seminary administrator. She served as president of the Historical Society of the United Methodist Church, president of the Wesleyan Theological Society, and for two terms as a participant in the international dialogue of Methodists and Roman Catholics, sponsored by the World Methodist Council. In 2022, she received the Distinguished Service Award from the General Commission of Archives and History of the United Methodist Church, and in 2025, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Wesleyan Theological Society.

Dr. Jack Levison:

Jack holds the W. J. A. Power Chair of Old Testament Interpretation and Biblical Hebrew at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. He is the author and editor of many books, including A Boundless God, which was selected as a 2021 Christianity Today book award winner. In the course of his career, Jack has received the Fitzpatrick Prize for theology at Cambridge University, as well as grants from the National Humanities Center, the Lilly Fellows Program, the Louisville Institute, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Rotary Foundation, the International Catacomb Society, Oxford Brookes University, the Sam Taylor Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.