Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Sarah Hammond passed away over Thanksgiving break. College of William and Mary administrators only became aware of her death when Hammond did not show up for class Monday. The cause of death was unknown at press time.
Chair of the Religious Studies Department John Morreall sent an email Monday to Hammond’s Religion in American Life and Thought to 1840 class.
“I have the awful responsibility of telling you that Prof. Sarah Hammond died unexpectedly over the Thanksgiving break,” Morreall said in the email. “We learned this only after she did not come in to teach your class this morning.”
Hammond was a native of Oberlin, Ohio. She received her B.A. in religious studies from Yale University in 1999, graduating magna cum laude.
According to the Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis, Hammond’s academic interests included 19th and 20th century evangelicalism; the intersection of religion, business and gender; and religion in popular culture.
After working on HIV/AIDS prevention among high-risk young women, Hammond returned to Yale in 2003 to earn her M.A. and M. Phil in religious studies. Hammond received her Ph.D. in American ligious History from Yale in 2010. Her dissertation, entitled “God’s Business Men: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War,” was being revised under contract with the University of Chicago Press.
According to the College website, Hammond specialized in American history and religious history, the relationship between religion and business and the history of Christianity.
While her classes will be cancelled all this week, the final research paper is still due next Monday, to be submitted to another professor in the religious studies department.
For more on this developing story, see Flathatnews.com.