Dr. Ahmad Greene-Hayes is Associate Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School and the Managing Editor of the Journal of Africana Religions. An accomplished scholar and teacher, he specializes in 19th and 20th century African American religious history; race, sexuality, and religion in the Americas; queer theory; interdisciplinary archive studies; and theories and methods in the study of religion and Black Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in Religion with certificates in African American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies from Princeton University, and his B.A. in History and Africana Studies, with highest honors, from Williams College.

Dr. Greene-Hayes is the author of Little Richard’s Witness: Liner Notes on Black Religion and Sexuality (Penguin Press, 2027) and Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans (University of Chicago Press, 2025), the 2026 finalist for both the ASALH Best New Book in African American History and the AAIHS Pauli Murray Book Prize. He has published essays in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Africana Religions, the Harvard Theological Review, Nova Religio, GLQ, and the Journal of African American History, among others.

In addition, alongside Judith Weisenfeld, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, and Vaughn Booker, Greene-Hayes is the co-editor of Africana Religions in America and the Challenges of History (forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in 2027).

Dr. Greene-Hayes has also held fellowships from Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music, Yale’s LGBT Studies program, the American Society of Church History, the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), and Princeton University’s “The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures,” to name a few. In 2022, he was inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College, and in 2023, he was inducted into the Society for the Study of Black Religion. Greene-Hayes is a steering committee member for the Religion and Sexuality Unit of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). From 2019-2024, he served as an advisory board member for the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network and as a steering committee member of the Afro-American Religious History Unit at the AAR, of which he is now co-chair for 2026-2031.

In conversation with his research, he has consulted and collaborated with the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice at Columbia University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the African American Policy Forum, Black Women’s Blueprint, Mirror Memoirs, and a host of other nonprofit organizations, churches, and other community institutions. Most recently, he was included in the Class of 2025 of the Native Son 101 List for “educating the masses on Black history to create a better future for the Black community.”