Selected Public Scholarship

• “Uranus and I are pretty good friends,” In Out there: Perspectives on the Study of Black Metaphysical Religion, J.T. Roane and Matthew Harris, eds., April 8, 2022.

• Co-editor with Mona Oraby, “Antiblackness as religion: Black living, Black dying, and Covid-19,” online forum, January-February 2021.

• “Black Religious Politics: An Interview with Historian Nicole Myers Turner,” book interview of Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia (UNC Press, 2020), Sept. 14, 2020.

• “Black Gods Among Us: In and Beyond HBO’s Watchmen,” for an online roundtable convened by Greene-Hayes, February 11, 2020.

• “Pessimism and Abolition Theology,” Roundtable response to Darnell Moore’s “Let’s Get Free: A Case for Abolition Theology,” February 10, 2020. Chicago Theological Seminary.

• “Transgendering Labor: Black Mothers and Black Men,” for the online roundtable on C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, December 5, 2018.

Upcoming Events

To be updated…

Selected Past Events

• “Black Religion & Black Study,” with James Howard Hill, Jr., for Conversations in Black Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, March 11, 2022.

• “The Great Migration, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Black Religions,” in-class guest lecture for AAAS 13: Black America Since the Civil War, Prof. Cori Tucker-Price, Dartmouth College, January 27, 2022.

• Moderator, “Humanities at the Limit of ‘the Human,’'“ Graduate Colloquium, The Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Brown University, August 5-6, 2021.

• Panelist, “Race, Religion, and Eugenics in Early Twentieth Century Louisiana,” Biopolitical Battle Lines: Between Eugenics and Black Lives Matter, California Institute of Technology, February 19, 2021.

• “Gods of the Flesh: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New Orleans,” virtual lecture and discussion, Program in Black Studies, Middlebury College. February 11, 2021.

• Paper: “‘The Church Is So Queer That It Even Baffles the Prophet’: Faith Healing and Male Sex Work in 1930s New Orleans,” Joint session between the American Historical Association, the American Society of Church History and the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History. January 2021.

• Paper: “He’s Sweet I Know: The Theopolitics of Black Church Rumor,” Book Panel on Alisha Lola Jones’ Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance (Oxford University Press, 2020), Music and Religion Unit, American Academy of Religion. November 2020.

• “Street Evangelists and Queer Prophets: Abolitionist Legacies in the Movement for Black Lives,” virtual lecture and discussion, Center for Inclusion and Diversity, California Institute of Technology. August 13, 2020.

• Roundtable Participant: “Africana Religious Studies: Fifty Years since the Black Revolution on Campus,” Afro-American Religious History and North American Religions Units, American Academy of Religion. Nov. 2019.

• Roundtable Participant: “The Future of ‘New Religious Movements,’” New Religious Movement Unit, American Academy of Religion. November 2019.

• Paper: “Oil and Roots: Reverend John L. Reed’s Black Baptist Pharmacopeia,” New Directions in Africana Religious Studies, American Studies Association. November 2019.

• “Shots of Deliverance: Mother Estella Boyd’s Healing Hands and the Midwestern Pentecostal Holiness Tradition,” in-class guest lecture, Department of Religion, Swarthmore College. October 30, 2019.

• Roundtable Participant: “‘Between Nothingness and Infinity’: Black Joy, Nihilism and Other Theologies” (with Calvin Warren, Christina Sharpe, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Darnell Moore and Alexis Pauline Gumbs). American Studies Association. November 2018.