Calling on Esther Across the Ages

Dr. Celene Ibrahim is a cultural historian specializing in religious studies and the author of Women and Gender in the Qur'an (Oxford University Press), among other titles.

Rabbi Rachel Adelman (PhD, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Hebrew College, where she recently earned rabbinic ordination (2021). She is the author of several academic and popular articles in Jewish studies, as well as two books: The Return of the Repressed: Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer and the Pseudepigrapha (Brill, 2009) and The Female Ruse: Women’s Deception and Divine Sanction in the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield Press, 2015), She just completed a new monograph: Daughters in Danger from the Hebrew Bible to Modern Midrash (forthcoming, Sheffield). When not writing books, papers, or divrei Torah, it is poetry that flows from her pen.

Rev. Gloria White-Hammond, MD, MDIV, serves alongside her husband, Rev. Ray A. Hammond, MD, to pastor Bethel’s 500-member congregation. In 2012, she launched the Significant Women Discipleship Ministry that coaches 300 women participants in small groups. Other innovative ministries include Shatter the Silence, which addresses sexual victimization of women and men in predominantly African American communities and Planning Ahead, which encourages church members to begin conversations and complete their advance directives regarding their wishes for end-of-life care. Dr. White-Hammond founded Do The Write Thing in 1994. The ministry subsequently served over 200 high-risk girls through small groups in Boston public schools, juvenile detention facilities, and on-site at Bethel AME Church. 
In 2015, she was appointed Swartz Resident Practitioner in Ministry Studies at Harvard Divinity School and co-directed the “Spirituality and Healing in Medicine” course at Harvard Medical School for a decade. 

She earned degrees from Boston University, Tufts University School of Medicine, and Harvard Divinity School. Dr. White-Hammond has received numerous community awards and honorary degrees and serves in key leadership roles, including trustee emeritus of Tufts University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Diana Seave Greenwald is an art historian and economic historian, who is currently William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. An expert in nineteenth-century American and French art, she has curated eight exhibitions during her tenure at the Gardner and edited four exhibition catalogs. These include Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory (2025), Manet: A Model Family (2024), and Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer (2023). She is also the co-author (with Nathaniel Silver) of Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Life (2022). Prior to joining the Gardner, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

In addition to being a curator, her academic research uses both statistical and qualitative analyses to explore the relationship between art and broader social and economic change during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her book Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art was published by Princeton University Press in 2021.

She received a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford. Before doctoral study, Diana earned an MPhil in Economic and Social History from Oxford and received a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Columbia University.