LEWISTON – A prominent and beloved member of the Bates College faculty, Associate Professor of Africana Sue E. Houchins, died Sunday at the age of 80.

In addition to being a witty and well-regarded scholar, Houchins earned the Lewiston-based college’s Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2022.

At the time, she said good teaching requires that “we instruct students in the practice of pushing back against what is normative, what is safe.”

College President Garry Jenkins said in an email to the college community that Houchins, who died Aug. 18, was “a brilliant scholar, champion of critical inquiry and academic freedom, and a gifted teacher.”

“I know that the entire community will mourn Sue,” Jenkins said, “and also feel enormous gratitude for her decades of contributions to our intellectual community.”

Among her Catholic-centered scholarly works was “Spiritual Narratives,” a 1988 volume featuring four narratives by 19th-century Black women, which Houchins edited.

In her foreword, she wrote that “these itinerant black women preachers whose autobiographies occasionally read like travelogues” were on a “psychic and spiritual journey” telling a story about their “quest for a locus of freedom.”

She wrote a 2018 book with a friend, Bates professor Baltasar Fra-Molinero, called “Black Bride of Christ: Chicaba, an African Nun in Eighteenth-Century Spain.”

It was a translation of a hagiography of Sor Teresa Chicaba, an African woman who spent her years after enslavement in a Dominican cloistered monastery, Jenkins wrote. He said it included an introduction by the two scholars exploring “the dynamics of race, gender and religion in 18th-century Spain.”

Houchins grew up in a prominent Black family in the nation’s capital, where her father once advised President Franklin Roosevelt. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a doctorate from Union Institute, also in Los Angeles.

After that, she taught for 22 years as a faculty member at the Claremont Colleges in California before she left to enter a Carmelite monastery in Baltimore, where her archival skills put its records in order.

But she returned to academia as a research associate at Harvard Divinity School and then a postdoctoral fellow position at the University of California, Berkeley.

Houchins joined the faculty at Bates in 2003, where her research and teaching focused on issues related to race, gender and sexuality.

Her courses at Bates, cross-listed in the Department of Religious Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, included Black Feminist Activist and Intellectual Traditions, where she used critical race theory as one mode of intellectual inquiry, Jenkins said.

Other courses, he said, included Survey of Literature of the Caribbean, Literary Representations of the Africana Religions, and The Writings of Toni Morrison.

Jenkins said Houchins’ impact on the students at Bates was profound. One of them, Samuel Jean-Francois, who graduated in 2023, praised her for her role in overseeing his senior thesis.

Jean-Francois said Houchins “pushed me to think critically since my first day at Bates, thereby expanding my mind to horizons I never imagined.”

Another unnamed honors student cited by Jenkins said, “Professor Houchins’ soaring intellect is matched only by her kindness.”