Dr. Ahmad Greene-Hayes is an Assistant Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School and a member of the Standing Committee for the Study of Religion and the Standing Committee on Higher Degrees in American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. He joined the faculty at Harvard in July 2022 after teaching at Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Religious Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University and he also earned certificates in African American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. His research interests include critical Black Studies, Black Atlantic Religions in the Americas, and race, queerness, and sexuality in the context of African American and Caribbean histories.

Dr. Greene-Hayes’s first book, Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New Orleans, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in the Class 200: New Studies in Religion series and will be released in early 2025. The book examines the Black Atlantic religious cultures and sexual politics that emerged in New Orleans—a vibrant, American port city—amidst Jim Crow policing and the migration of African Americans, West Indians, and Central Americans to the region in the early twentieth century. It also tracks intraracial and intercultural conflicts among Black religious practitioners within “the Negro church” and between “Negro cults and sects.” Relatedly, the book also considers the world of policing encircling Black people during the era of Jim Crow, a period in which “policing” included the jail cell and the state-sanctioned court of the lynch mob, and it centers on how Black people countered them through new and rescripted Black Atlantic religious, political, and sexual cultures.

Dr. Greene-Hayes is the past recipient of numerous fellowships and awards from the Ford Foundation, the American Academy of Religion, the Mellon Mays Foundation, the Political Theology Network, the Social Science Research Council, and many more. During the 2017-2018 academic year, he held the prestigious LGBT Studies Research Fellowship at Yale University, and in 2020, he was awarded the American Society of Church History Research Fellowship. In 2022, he was inducted into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College. Dr. Greene-Hayes’ research has been published in The Black Scholar, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, The Journal of African American History, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Nova Religio: the Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, and the Journal of Africana Religions. He has forthcoming articles in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Harvard Theological Review, and QTR: A Journal of Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion. Dr. Greene-Hayes’ other writing and public commentary on issues of race, gender, sexuality, politics, and religion have also appeared in Essence, Ebony, The Immanent Frame, and Black Perspectives: a blog of the African American Intellectual History Society.

Dr. Greene-Hayes is a steering committee member for both the Afro-American Religious History Unit and the Religion and Sexuality Unit at the American Academy of Religion, and he is also an advisory board member for the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network. In conversation with his research, Dr. Greene-Hayes has consulted and collaborated with the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice at Columbia University, the African American Policy Forum, Black Women’s Blueprint, and a host of other nonprofit organizations, churches, and other community institutions.

With the contested religions of Black people in central view by way of a rigorous process of archival theorization, Dr. Greene-Hayes’ research agenda in the field of Black Studies and Religious Studies ultimately posits that Black people contrive and plot sacred geographical maps for racial, sexual, and religious meaning and often in refusal to overarching systems of domination.