About
I am a scholar of African American religious history, focusing on the late-19th century through the mid-20th century. My research explores the intersections of religion and race, Black new religious movements, cultural representations of African American religion, African American religion and medicine, and African American women’s religious activism.
This period has captivated me because of the cultural, religious, and political creativity in Black communities in the U.S. South in slavery’s long wake and in northern cities as a result of migration from the South and immigration from the Caribbean. My work locates African American religion at the center of examinations of racial structures and shifting racial identities, film representation and production, theories and treatment of mental illness, and gender and urban politics to illuminate religion’s significance in the experiences of Black people in the U.S. in this period.
Jack Delano, “At a Negro Church in Heard County, Georgia,” 1941, Farm Security Administration .
I teach in the Department of Religion at Princeton University, where I am the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and currently serve as Chair of the Department of Religion. I am associated faculty in Princeton’s Department of African American Studies, Department of History, and Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and I serve on the Executive Committee of the Effron Center for the Study of America. Prior to joining the faculty at Princeton, I was Professor of Religion on the William R. Kenan, Jr. Chair at Vassar College and, before that, Assistant Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University.
My research has been supported by grants, including from the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I am an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 2021, with a $1 million grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, I founded The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures and serve as the project’s Director.