Beth Allison Barr

Beth Allison Barr (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is James Vardaman Endowed Chair of History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she specializes in medieval history, women’s history, and church history.

She is the author of the USA Today bestseller The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. Her work has been featured by NPR and the New Yorker, and she has written for Christianity Today, the Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, Sojourners, and Baptist News Global. Barr lives in Texas with her husband, a Baptist pastor, and their two children.

As a pastor’s wife for 25 years, Beth Allison Barr has lived with assumptions about what she should do and who she should be.
In her latest book, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife, Barr draws on that experience and her expertise as a historian to trace the history of the role of the pastor’s wife, showing how it both helped and hurt women in conservative Protestant traditions.