Preston Williams

Preston Williams, Ph.D., has been the Houghton Professor since 1971. He came to HDS after having been a professor of social ethics at Boston University for five years. Before that, as a Presbyterian minister, he was the Protestant chaplain at Brandeis University. In his years at Harvard, he has served in various capacities beyond his professorial role: He was Acting Dean of the Divinity School in 1974-75, and acting director of Harvard's W.E.B. DuBois Institute from 1975 to 1977. Since 1998 he has been director of the Summer Leadership Institute, a program of the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life that brings religious leaders from urban settings to Harvard for  two weeks of intensive classes on community development. His teaching has centered on Christian ethics and the black American experience, especially as reflected in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. He is the author of many articles and books, and is an editor-at-large for The Christian Century. He has been a guest professor and speaker at institutions around the world, including Nagoya University in Japan in 1996