Dr. M. Shawn Copeland is Professor emerita of Systematic Theology at Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and Theologian-in-Residence at Saint Katharine Drexel Parish, Roxbury, Massachusetts. She is an internationally recognized scholar and award-winning writer––the author and/or editor or co-editor of eight (8) books including Desire, Darkness, and Hope: Theology in a Time of Impasse, Engaging the Thought of Constance FitzGerald, OCD (with Laurie Cassidy, 2021), Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience (2018), and Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (2010) as well as 135 articles, book chapters, and essays on spirituality, theological anthropology, political theology, social suffering, gender, and race; and along with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has co-edited two volumes of the international theological journal Concilium: Violence Against Women (1/1994) and Feminist Theologies in Different Contexts (1996/1).

Copeland is a former Convener of the Black Catholic Theological Symposium (BCTS), an interdisciplinary learned association of Black Catholic scholars. She was the first African American and first African American woman to serve as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA).