Falk, N.
Full Name[edit]
Nancy Auer Falk
Affiliation[edit]
Other Information[edit]
Nancy Falk originates in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Upon graduating magna cum laude in history from Cedar Crest College, she moved to the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. There she took an MA and PhD in History of Religions. Her dissertation, directed by Mircea Eliade and Joseph Kitagawa, concerned a study of the lay Buddhist cult of the Buddha’s relics. At Chicago, Nancy Falk served as student secretary and editorial assistant to Mircea Eliade, and she revised the translation of Paul Tillich’s autobiography in the volume, On the Boundary; she also edited the Divinity School’s house journal, Criterion, for three years. Nancy Falk was the second woman to complete a PhD in her program at Chicago, and she came to Western Michigan University in 1966 as the first woman graduate to begin a full-time appointment and a teaching career. Her berth was in the new Department of Religion (later, when it inaugurated an MA program, Comparative Religion). The department, an innovation of Cornelius Loew’s, was on the cutting edge of interest in promoting the study of religion at public universities. Loew, who went on to become Academic Vice President at Western, was educated at the Union Theological Seminary and had been an assistant to Paul Tillich. Source