Ahmad Greene-Hayes

Associate Professor of African American Religious Studies
headshot of Ahmad Green-Hayes
ahmadg@hds.harvard.edu

Education

  • BA, Williams College
  • MA, Princeton University
  • PhD, Princeton University

Profile

Dr. Ahmad Greene-Hayes (he/him) is Associate Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School, and he is a member of the Standing Committee for the Study of Religion and the Standing Committee on Advanced Degrees in American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Dr. Greene-Hayes is an accomplished scholar, teacher, and mentor, and his research and teaching interests include 19th and 20th century African American religious history; race, sexuality, and religion in the Americas; 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 Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New Orleans (University of Chicago Press, 2025), and he has published essays in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Africana Religions, Nova Religio, GLQ, and the Journal of African American History, among others. He is completing his second book project provisionally titled, Little Richard’s Witness: Liner Notes on Black Religion and Sexuality, which is under contract with Penguin Random House in the Significations Black biography series edited by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and he is also working on his third book project engaging spiritual encounter in the archive. 

Dr. Greene-Hayes has held prestigious fellowships from Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music in 2024-25, Yale’s LGBT Studies program, the American Society of Church History, 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 currently a member for the Historical Studies Jury for the American Academy of Religion’s Awards for Excellence in the Study of Religion, and he is also a steering committee member for the Religion and Sexuality Unit of the AAR. From 2019-2024, he served as a steering committee member of the Afro-American Religious History Unit at the AAR and as an advisory board member for the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network. 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. 

CV available upon request.

Selected publications

Courses

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