Donald B. Kraybill (born 1945) is an American author, lecturer, and educator on Anabaptist faiths and culture. Kraybill is widely recognized for his studies on Anabaptist groups and in particular the Amish. He has researched and written extensively on Anabaptist culture. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Elizabethtown College and Senior Fellow Emeritus at Elizabethtown's Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. Early life and education Kraybill was born in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, in 1945 to a Mennonite family and grew up on dairy farms in Mount Joy, Lampeter and Morgantown. His surname Kraybill is a form of the name Graybill which is a typical Mennonite and Amish name, first recorded in America in 1728. He graduated from Lancaster Mennonite High School in 1963. After attending Millersville University for two years, he received a bachelor's degree from Eastern Mennonite University in 1967, a master's degree from Temple University in 1971, and a PhD in sociology from Temple University in 1976. At Temple he was a research assistant to John Hostetler, a recognized authority on Amish society who had himself grown up Amish and who was influential in Kraybill's interest in studying the groups. Career Kraybill served for five years as an associate pastor in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, at the Willow Street Mennonite Church and served four years as the associate director of Mennonite Voluntary Service as a conscientious objector. He started teaching sociology at Elizabethtown College in 1971. From 1979 to 1985 he chaired the Sociology and Social Work Department and from 1989 to 1996 was director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown. He was provost of Messiah College from 1996 to 2002 before returning to Elizabethtown in 2003. In October 2005, Young Center was awarded a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a three-year collaborative research project entitled "Amish Diversity and Identity: Transformations in 20th Century America." In addition to Kraybill as senior investigator, the investigative team included Steven Nolt, a professor of history at Goshen College in Indiana, and Karen Johnson-Weiner, a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Potsdam. A national panel of seven scholars advised the research team throughout the project. The NEH grant enabled the researchers to investigate the Amish experience at the national level, giving attention to geographic expansion, the growth of diversity, changing conceptions of identity and evolving patterns of