Dr. Susan Shaw

Susan Shaw was born in Rome, Georgia, and raised in a Southern Baptist church there. She attended the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where she discovered feminism while earning an M.A. and Ph.D. In the 1980s and 1990s she was Assistant Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at California Baptist College, and for four subsequent years an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at George Fox College (a conservative Quaker institution). Although she came to understand herself as lesbian during that time, she did not come out publicly because she would have been fired from these conservative schools if she was open about it. She resigned from George Fox College in 1995 when she could no longer live with the dissonance. She left the Southern Baptist Convention in 1996 over the change to its constitution that excluded congregations that affirmed LGBTQ+ people

Shaw joined the (then) women studies faculty at Oregon State University in 1996, where she found openness to her sexuality and support for her controversial feminist writing about religion. For her, religion and sexuality are not necessarily in conflict and the classes she has taught support this concept. Her most recent books are Reflective Faith: A Theological Toolbox for Women, a book and workbook that make feminist theology and feminist biblical criticism accessible for a general audience, and a book on intersectional theology with Dr. Grace Ji-Sun Kim of Earlham School of Religion. She and Kim also published Surviving God: A New VIsion of God through the Eyes of Sexual Abuse Survivors and Feminist Theologies: The Basics. Shaw with Dr. Janet Lee is the co-author and co-editor of Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings. She was a senior columnist for Baptist News Global, and she wrote for Huffington Post on issues of social difference, social justice, and religious liberty.

She also is the general editor of an encyclopedia of women’s lives worldwide, two Open Educational Resources textbooks, and a reference book on women and religion around the world. She was the PI on an NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grant that seeks to improve recruiting, hiring, retaining, and advancing women in STEM and social and behavioral sciences at OSU and another that supported the ADVANCE Journal. Her final book is about how to retire for academics and will be published by Princeton University Press in 2026. She retired in December 2025.

This profile created from Oregon State University faculty pages by Doris Malkmus and supplemented by Susan Shaw.

Biography Date: , December 18, 2025

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