Dr. Karen Seat specializes in U.S. religious history, American evangelicalism, and gender studies and has served as an academic head and director at the University of Arizona for the past ten years. In 2012, Dr. Seat began serving as director of the Religious Studies Program, followed by an appointment as Acting Head of the Department of Classics in 2014, and in 2015 she was appointed head of the newly reorganized Department of Religious Studies and Classics in the College of Humanities. In addition, since 2016 she has served as director of the School of International Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (SILLC) in the College of Humanities.

Her publications include “Providence Has Freed Our Hands”: Women’s Missions and the American Encounter with Japan (Syracuse University Press), on nineteenth-century Protestant women's mission movements and their impact on American ideologies regarding gender, race, Christianity, and civilization. Her current research focuses on conservative Christians' engagement with American politics in modern American history. She is co-editor, with Elizabeth Flowers, of A Marginal Majority: Women, Gender, and a Reimagining of Southern Baptists (University of Tennessee Press). Her current book project is titled Free Market Family Values: The Rise of Neoliberal Christianity in the United States. She teaches courses on American religious history and gender studies in religion.

Dr. Seat received her Ph.D. in Religion from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.