Dr. Ellen Blue is the Mouzon Biggs, Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity and United Methodist Studies. She is coordinator of the D.Min. degree in Transformational Leadership for Women. An ordained elder in the Louisiana Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, she is Director of Ministerial Formation for UMC students.
Dr. Blue is the author of St. Mark’s and the Social Gospel: Methodist Women and Civil Rights in New Orleans, a history of a deaconess-run community center published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2011 and reissued in paperback in 2014. Her book coauthored with Charles M. Wood, Attentive to God: Thinking Theologically in Ministry, was published by Abingdon in 2008 and has been translated into Korean.
Several of her case studies have appeared in Christian Century. She has written many other published articles and chapters in books, including “Should Theological Education Be Different for Women?” in Women and Ordination in the Christian Churches: International Perspectives. Her essay, “‘Yes, We are Everywhere’: Thirty Years with the Women for Progressive Action, Lower Ninth Ward,” won the Women in United Methodist History Writing Award from the General Commission on Archives and History (GCAH) in 2013 and appeared in Methodist History.
She was awarded a $30,000 Lilly Faculty Fellowship for her project, “In Case of Katrina: Reinventing the United Methodist Church in Post-Katrina Louisiana,” and her next book, forthcoming from Cascade Books, is on that topic.