Ranmi Bae

Ranmi Bae’s doctoral research explores the history of early Korean Christianity through the lens of gender, colonialism, and World Christianity. Her dissertation, titled Colonial Korean Women’s Fourfold Gospel at the Intersection of Gender and World Christianity, investigates the theological agency of Korean Holiness women between 1901 and 1943. While existing scholarship has largely focused on American male missionaries and Korean male pastors—often portraying Korean women either as passive victims or merely complementary assistants—Bae’s work demonstrates that colonial Korean women actively embodied, contextualized, and indigenized the Fourfold Gospel theology (regeneration, sanctification, divine healing, and the Second Coming).

By cross-examining primary sources in Korean, Japanese, and English through a postcolonial feminist framework and Korean relational cultural concepts, her research illustrates how women utilized theology as a dynamic force to navigate patriarchal and colonial structures. Bae shows how these women reconfigured available spaces into arenas of gendered authority and religious leadership, ultimately shaping the polycentric development of World Christianity and even transmitting their lived theology back to American traditions.

What Faculty Say

The publication record of Ms. Bae, in her discipline, is already proof, not simply of her future potential, but of the quality of her research. She has strongly exceeded normal expectations with four peer-reviewed articles derived from her work in our PhD program... The topics of her work—Baptist, Holiness, Gender, Global Missions—reveal her ability to work in various sub-disciplines with ease and demonstrate her extensive skill in working with primary and archival sources. I have found some of her interpretive work so insightfully rich that I have cited her in the book project I am currently writing.

 Dr. Doug Weaver, Ranmi's dissertation mentor