Bradley Daugherty

Biography

Brad Daugherty earned a Ph.D. in Religion from Vanderbilt University with an emphasis in historical studies. He also holds an M.A. in Religion from Vanderbilt, an M.Div. from Boston University School of Theology, and a B.A. in religious studies from Olivet Nazarene University. After completing his Ph.D., he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Digital Humanities at Vanderbilt.  

Dr. Daugherty primarily teaches in the Honors program, teaching the first-year Honors Interdisciplinary Seminar, Engaging the Bible & Culture, and Engaging Religion & Culture. Prior to coming to Belmont, Dr. Daugherty taught at Vanderbilt and Sewanee, among other places, and also spent time as a writing instructor and consultant, working with writers ranging from first-year undergrads to doctoral students.  

As a scholar, Dr. Daugherty is interested in the diversity of Christian practices across time, place, and cultures, and in how different Christian communities have understood the life of holiness and sought to live it out.  His research focuses on the practice of Christianity in Roman North Africa, a time and place where ancient Christians were especially concerned with and often fought about just such issues. Those fights led to questions about the nature of Christian community, about how to live faithfully in world dominated by a violent empire, about how to forgive one another, about the meaning of religious ritual, and about the role of the clergy in all of this. Those are all questions that remain near and dear to Dr. Daugherty, both as a historian and as a Christian.  

Dr. Daugherty is active member of Christ Church Cathedral, Nashville, where he has served as a member of the vestry and as part of the Isaac Project, an ongoing re-evaluation of Christ Church’s past involvement with slavery and white supremacy and of its current practice. He is currently in the process of, hopefully and by God’s grace, being ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church.  

Dr. Daugherty lives in Nashville with his wife Heather, who is Belmont’s University Minister, and their two children. A native Midwesterner and Hoosier, he keeps telling himself that his brief sojourn here in SEC country is almost over, but well into his second decade he keeps believing it less and less.