Jill Raitt, a longtime professor of theology and advocate for women in higher education, passed away on May 27. She was 94 years old.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Dr. Raitt began her undergraduate education at Radcliffe College, a women’s college in Massachusetts that has since incorporated into Harvard University. After studying with the Society of Jesus in Rome, she transferred to San Francisco College for Women, earning her bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1953. Upon graduation, she joined the Society of the Sacred Heart and spent the next 11 years in cloister.
In 1964, Dr. Raitt left the order to pursue a master’s degree in medieval and reformation theology from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She next enrolled at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, where she earned her doctorate in theology in 1970.
Dr. Raitt briefly taught as a founding member of the department of religious studies at the University of California, Riverside before joining the faculty at Duke University’s Divinity School, where she became school’s first woman tenured professor. While there, she participated in the founding of the Divinity School’s Women’s Center, which now annually hosts the Jill Raitt Lecture Series in her honor.
In 1981, the University of Missouri recruited Dr. Raitt to create its department of religious studies, where she taught for the next two decades. Although she herself was Catholic, she was dedicated to advancing education and scholarship on eastern, western, and Indigenous religions, insisting her department’s faculty equally reflected the world’s religions. She established the Center for Religion, the Professions, and the Public and served as its director for several years. In 2002, she retired from her full-time position, but remained on the faculty part-time as a professor emerita until 2008. Later in life, she returned as a visiting professor and established the Jill Raitt Opportunities for Excellence Fund to provide recurring financial support to the department she founded.
After leaving the University of Missouri, Dr. Raitt transferred to Fontbonne University in St. Louis and served as the CSJ Endowed Chair in Catholic Thought for three years. Following stints as a visiting professor with the University of Missouri and Saint Louis University, she served as a National Endowment for the Humanities Residential Fellow at SLU’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Throughout her career, Dr. Raitt was an active member of the American Academy of Religion, serving as its president in 1981. As a leading scholar of reformation, she authored several books, including The Colloquy of Montbeliard: Religion and Politics in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1993). At the time of her death, she was in the midst of completing a new book on the spiritual direction of women in early modern Europe.