The Audacious Ministry of Zilpha Elaw: Race, Religion, and Rebellion (HC) (2026)

The Audacious Ministry of Zilpha Elaw analyzes the life, autobiography, and transatlantic travels of one of the first Black Methodist women ministers in history. A celebrity of her time, hardly any documentation on Zilpha Elaw is left in the historical records of the United States and Britain. In a time before women were allowed to minister in nearly every US Christian denomination, she traveled through the North and South before the Civil War and converted thousands to Methodism before she emigrated to England, where she established another successful itinerant ministry and published a memoir. Kimberly D. Blockett traces the history of misogyny and violence targeting Black worshipers, using Elaw's ever-moving path through the United States and England as a methodology for examining the relationship between geographic spaces, ideology, and subjectivity. By excavating a history purposefully buried into obscurity, The Audacious Ministry of Zilpha Elaw subverts everything we assume we know about race, gender, and faith in nineteenth-century Protestant communities.