Donald Kraybill

Donald B. Kraybill (born 1946) is an author, lecturer, and educator on Anabaptist faiths and living. Kraybill is widely recognized for his studies on Anabaptist groups, and is the foremost living expert on the Old Order Amish.

Kraybill is Distinguished College Professor, and Senior Fellow at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. He previously served as chair of the Sociology and Social Work Department at Elizabethtown from 1979 to 1985 and as director of the Young Center from 1989 to 1996. He was provost of Messiah College (PA) from 1996 to 2002, before returning to Elizabethtown College in 2003.

In October 2005, Young Center was awarded a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a three-year collaborative research project entitled "Amish Diversity and Identity: Transformations in 20th Century America." In addition to Kraybill as senior investigator, the investigative team includes Steven Nolt, Professor of History at Goshen College in Indiana, and Karen Johnson-Weiner, Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Potsdam. A national panel of seven scholars advised the research team throughout the project.

The NEH grant enabled the researchers to investigate the Amish experience at the national level, giving attention to geographic expansion, the growth of diversity, changing conceptions of identity and evolving patterns of interaction with the larger society. The team also explored how the Amish have contributed to shaping the identity of a nation that made exceptions in the areas of education, Social Security, and child labor for a religious minority living on its cultural margins. The project resulted in a website (http://www2.etown.edu/amishstudies/); an international conference, The Amish in America: New Identities and Diversities, held in 2007; and a book, The Amish.

...
Wikipedia