Biography

Angela Franks, Ph.D., is a theologian, speaker, writer, and mother of six. She serves as Associate Professor of Theology at the Catholic University of America and as the President of the Academy of Catholic Theology for 2025-26. She is a Senior Fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, as well as a Life and Dignity Writing Fellow for Church Life Journal (University of Notre Dame). She is finishing a two-volume book series on the body and identity. The first volume is Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self, which appeared in August 2025 with University of Notre Dame Press. Body and identity won a Research Expanded Reason Award in 2025. She has been published in America Magazine, First Things, Public Discourse, Church Life Journal, Catholic World Report, The Plough, and academic journals such as Theological Studies, Christian Bioethics, Nova et Vetera, Communio, and others, in addition to contributing chapters to edited books. She has written two books on sexual ethics and the history of eugenics.

 

Publications

Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2025.

“The Analogous and Subsisting Person: An Exercise in Theological Anthropology.” International Journal of Systematic Theology, online July 2025.

“Identity and the Trinitarian Imago.” Nova et Vetera (English ed.) 23, no. 2 (2025): 523–50.

“Grasping the Form: A Proposal for Contemplative and Synthetic Systematic Theology.” The New Ressourcement 1, no. 1 (2024): 204–31.

“Christ as the Way of Synodality.” The Thomist 87 (2023): 255-70.