Before graduating from high school, Rev. Dr. Charrise Barron could often be found singing, playing piano, and directing choirs in her local church in Houston, Texas. She went on to serve in music ministry at churches throughout the United States and in London, England.
After she earned her Bachelor of Arts cum laude in computer science from Harvard University, Dr. Barron worked around the world as a senior business systems analyst for Mars, Inc., the company that makes M&M’s and snickers candy. In a radical act of faith, Dr. Barron walked away from the corporate, jet-setting lifestyle. She acknowledged her call to preach and pastor, and enrolled in seminary. She attended Yale Divinity School, where she was also a student in Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music (ISM). She graduated from Yale with a Master of Divinity summa cum laude.
During her time at Yale University, Dr. Barron served as pastor of The Black Church at Yale, a fully student-run campus church founded in the early 1970s by black Yale students and alumni. Her pastorate at The Black Church at Yale concluded in 2010, as she took another leap of faith—this time into doctoral studies. Dr. Barron earned a PhD from Harvard University in African and African American studies, with a secondary field of study in ethnomusicology.
Dr. Barron is currently Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University. She joined the Harvard University faculty in 2022, also serving as a Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellow (2022-2023) at the the University of Texas at Austin’s Butler School of Music. Prior to teaching at Harvard, she taught at Brown University as Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Music, Yale University as Postdoctoral Associate in Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music, and at Colorado College as Pre-Doctoral Riley Scholar-in-Residence in the Music Department. While her research, writing, and presentations have explored a range of topics in African American religion, music, culture, and history, her current book project centers on contemporary gospel music. This work illuminates the marked shifts away from previous eras of gospel performance and culture which have defined recent decades of the genre.
Dr. Barron is an associate minister at Union Baptist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and continues to compose and perform gospel music.