Phyllis Zagano


Phyllis Zagano is an American author and academic. She has written and spoken on the role of women in the Catholic Church and is an advocate for the ordination of women as deacons. Her writings have been variously translated into Indonesian, Czech, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Early life and education

Zagano was born in Queens, New York. She graduated from Sacred Heart Academy in 1965. She has a BA from Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York ; master's degrees in communications from Boston University, in literature from Long Island University, and in theology from St. John's University ; and a PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1979.

Career

Zagano was program officer at the National Humanities Center from 1979 to 1980, and taught at Fordham University from 1980 to 1984. She was a researcher at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York from 1984 to 1986 and a Coolidge Fellow at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1987. She taught at Boston University from 1988 to 1999.
Since 2002, Zagano has taught at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, where she is senior research associate-in-residence and adjunct professor of religion. In 2005 she held a visiting professorship at the Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut. In 2009, she was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Limerick's Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, Ireland, where she was a lecturer. In 2015 she was a Fulbright Senior Specialist at the Waterford Institute of Technology, in Waterford, Ireland.
Zagano received "Layperson of the Year" award from Voice of the Faithful in 2012.
She received the 2014 Isaac Hecker Award for Social Justice from the Paulist Center of Boston.
In 2016, Pope Francis appointed Zagano to the Papal Study Commission on the Women's Diaconate. The Commission's first meeting was held November 25–26, 2016.
Her papers are archived by the Women and Leadership Archives of Loyola University Chicago.

Publications

Zagano's publications include: