Carl Abrams

Douglas Carl Abrams earned a PhD in history at the University of Maryland College Park, a certificate in French Studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, and participated in an NEH Summer Seminar at Harvard Divinity School.He has presented papers at professional conferences, including ones at Louisville Seminary and Duke University. He has written four books: Missionaries in the Golden Age of Hollywood: Race, Gender, and Spirituality on the Big Screen; Old-Time Religion Embracing Modernist Culture: American Fundamentalism between the Wars; Selling the Old-Time Religion: American Fundamentalists and Mass Culture, 1920-1940; and.Conservative Constraints: North Carolina and the New Deal.

Abrams has done several interviews with national and international media on religion and culture, including NPR, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, France 24, Die Zeit (Germany), German National Public Radio, The Guardian (UK), Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Religion News Service. Abrams recently lectured on C-SPAN3.

In addition to religious and political history, he enjoys Africa, where he has spent several summers working with American university students and nationals. Abrams serves as a trustee on the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. He also loves spending time in France during the summer and he and his wife established a Study Abroad-Paris program for history undergraduates. Beyond Africa and France, interests include reading, classical music, classic films, and hiking.

He and his wife are members of Emmanuel Upstate Presbyterian Church.

Praise for Missionaries in the Golden Age of Hollywood: Race, Gender, and Spirituality on the Big Screen

“In this year 2023, this lover of France has released another very valuable piece of research related to the same fields (mass culture and US Evangelicalism). It is Missionaries in the Golden Age of Hollywood: Race, Gender, and Spirituality on the Big Screen.”

“There are not that many authors who publish significant History books over a period of more than 25 years. Professor Douglas Carl Abrams is one of them.”

 Sebastien Fath CNRS Paris, France

Praise for Old-Time Religion Embracing Modernist Culture: American Fundamentalism between the Wars

"Douglas Carl Abrams’ thought-provoking book offers a timely, critical reassessment of Protestant fundamentalism’s founding generation”

--Darren Dochuk           University of Notre Dame

 “Dispassionate, scholarly, and brimming with insights and new discoveries, this book is an unusually valuable addition to the corpus on the history of religion in the twentieth-century United States.”

--Markku Ruotsila  University of Helsinki