Daisy L. Machado ’81
Professor of Church History
CONTACT
3041 Broadway, AD 407
New York, NY 10027
212-280-1385
dmachado@uts.columbia.edu
EDUCATION
B.A., Brooklyn College
M.S.W., Hunter College School of Social Work
M.Div., Union Theological Seminary
Ph.D., University of Chicago.
biography
Daisy L. Machado serves as Professor of Church History. Her scholarship focuses specifically on United States Christianities. She holds a B.A., Brooklyn College; an M.S.W., Hunter College School of Social Work; a Master of Divinity, Union Theological Seminary, New York; and a Ph.D., University of Chicago. She is the first U.S. Latina ordained in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in 1981 in the Northeast Region and has served inner city congregations in Brooklyn, Houston, and Fort Worth.
From 1996-1999 Dr. Machado served as the first Director of the Hispanic Theological Initiative a $3.4 million project funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts to increase the presence of Latina/o faculty teaching in seminaries, schools of religion and religion departments around the country. From 2002-06 she served as the Chair of the Board of the Hispanic Summer Program an innovative masters level program currently supported by over 30 seminaries and schools of theology. Dr. Machado was also Luce Lecturer in Urban Ministry, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Lecturer at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, Dallas, Texas, teaching a class on “Latina/o Spirituality and Medicine.” In July 2008 she was invited to serve as chaplain for Week 3 of the Summer Season at the Chatauqua Institute, making her the first Latina to serve as chaplain. Her daily sermons were preached to a gathering of over 600 participants every day. In spring 2010 she presented the keynote address for the Institute for Lived Theology held at the University of San Diego, California, titled “Borderlife and the Religious Imagination.”
Dr. Machado’s publications include Borders and Margins: Hispanic Disciples in the Southwest, 1888-1942. New York: Oxford University Press; co-editor of A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press; as well as numerous chapters in anthologies, encyclopedias, journals, and magazines. Her two latest publications are ‘The Southern U.S. Border: Immigration, the Historical Imagination, and Globalization’ in Rethinking Economic Globalization, Pamela K. Brubaker, Rebecca Todd Peters, Laura A. Stivers, eds. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006) and “Voices from Nepantla: Latinas in U.S. Religious History” in Feminist Intercultural Theology: Latina Explorations for a Just World, María Pilar Aquino and María José Rosado-Nunes, eds. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007). She has also lectured in Mexico, Venezuela, and Germany, and has keynoted at many Disciples of Christ Regional as well as church-wide Disciples events.
A native of Cuba, Dr. Machado was raised in New York, lived in Texas for twenty years, and lived in Lexington, KY for two years, where she served as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Lexington Theological Seminary. Dr. Machado has a great interest in the concept of “borderlands,” which is a multilayered word that not only refers to a specific geographic location, but for Latinas and other women of color also refers to a social, economic, political, and personal location within the dominant culture. She is also a strong advocate for a comprehensive reformation of current U.S. immigration laws, especially now that Arizona has enacted SB 1070.
Dr. Machado’s current research and writing project focuses on the Prosperity Gospel in the U.S. Latino Protestant communities with a special look at the G-12 Movement, which has been imported from Colombia. Her course CH333, “Religious Movements from the Margins: A Look at the Prosperity Gospel in the U.S.,” introduces the student to the development of the prosperity gospel ideal in the U.S. religious landscape and how this ideal has played out historically in racial ethnic communities.
Dr. Machado is also involved the early stages of a longer-term research project with Dr. Evelyn Parker of Perkins School of Theology, Dallas, called “God Behind Bars,” which seeks to investigate and interpret the religious reality of Latina and African American women inmates. A first consultation was held at Perkins in May 2009 and a second at Union in August 2010. Each consultation gathered recently released female Latina inmates as well as prison chaplains, social workers, and selected directors of church-run prison ministries, to talk about religion and the religious life of incarcerated women of color. A second phase of the project will involve interviewing African American and Latina inmates who are incarcerated.
PREVIOUS COURSES
Eugenics, Race, Gender, and Nation: A Brief History (Fall 2015)
Religious Movements from the Margins: A Look at the Prosperity Gospel (Spring 2015)
History of Christianity since Reformation (Fall 2017)
The U.S. Latino Church: Borderlands and History (Spring 2018)
IN THE NEWS
Professor Daisy L. Machado participated and preached at a protest against an immigration detention center, Willacy Detention Center, Raymondville, Texas in 2010. Watch the video.
Recent Courses
SPRING 2021, FALL 2021
This course offers an introductory overview of the United States religious experience with specific focus on Christianity. The story of Christianity in the United States is a history that at its core is about the diversity of belief, insiders and outsiders, dissent, myth, and imagination. Students seek to understand how religion, especially Protestant Christianity, has both shaped and been shaped by political, economic, and cultural conditions in the United States. Departing from the more traditional approach that begins in New England and uses the experiences of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority as the meta-narrative of the U.S., this course instead uses the diversity of United States Christianity and the variety of its expressions as a key lens of analysis without forgetting the shared common heritage.
SPRING 2021
This course focuses on Spain from the Middle Ages to the present day, specifically on the "La convivencia" (“Coexistence") period. Students carefully examine what historian Rosa María Menocal called a "golden reign of tolerance", a time when Catholics, Jews, and Muslims lived together for more than four centuries on the Iberian Peninsula. Culture, religion, economics, art and music are explored to better understand this convivencia in Al Andalus, as the Muslims called their Spanish homeland, where a culture of openness and assimilation flourished. Since the term "convivencia" is a problematic one, history guides the work of the course to uncover how real this "golden reign of tolerance" was. Key topics include social fabric and differentiation of toleration within classes; exoticism of architecture as exemplified in the Alhambra; humanism and artistry of the time. Finally, we look at modern Spain for traces of this past of toleration despite the Franco dictatorship and continued political fractures.
Co-taught with Jane Huber.
SPRING 2022
This course explores the role of memory, particularly religious memory, in the development of the United States. Using the work of scholars in the area of history and memory, students examine the idea of a "historical past", which historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood concluded, is "not a remembered past, nor a sum of remembered pasts", but an "ideal past", a "past that has been organized through the workings of a constructive analytical imagination". By studying specific themes such as land, gender, economics, race, sexuality we examine the collective memories of the nation about its "ideal past," to better understand how these were shaped by religious belief and ideals and continue to impact the United States’ society today.
FALL 2020
The United States religious landscape has been shaped by the powerful influence of what has become known as "prosperity gospel" or "prosperity theology". This prosperity theology surged in popularity in the 1980s with the rise of television evangelists who helped to shape and market United States Christianities to a nationwide audience of consumers. What is the history and place of the prosperity gospel in the United States religious landscape? How has it evolved and who have been its main proponents? What does this gospel look like in racial and ethnic communities and who are its main voices? This course examines the development of the prosperity gospel movement with special attention to the role played by gender and race in its development.
FALL 2020
The United States religious landscape has been shaped by the powerful influence of what has become known as "prosperity gospel" or "prosperity theology". This prosperity theology surged in popularity in the 1980s with the rise of television evangelists who helped to shape and market United States Christianities to a nationwide audience of consumers. What is the history and place of the prosperity gospel in the United States religious landscape? How has it evolved and who have been its main proponents? What does this gospel look like in racial and ethnic communities and who are its main voices? This course examines the development of the prosperity gospel movement with special attention to the role played by gender and race in its development.