Ahmad Greene-Hayes
Education
- BA, Williams College
- MA, Princeton University
- PhD, Princeton University
Profile
Dr. Ahmad Greene-Hayes is 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. A social historian and critical theorist, Greene-Hayes is an accomplished scholar and teacher, and 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 religious histories.
He is the author of Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New Orleans, which is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in the Class 200: New Studies in Religion series, and he has published essays in the Journal of Africana Religions, Nova Religio, GLQ, and the Journal of African American History, among others. He has also held prestigious fellowships from Yale’s LGBT Studies program, the American Society of Church History, and Princeton’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.
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, he 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.
Courses
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Also view FAS courses taught by Ahmad Greene-Hayes. (HDS students: for jointly offered and reading and research courses, please enroll in the HDS version of the course.)
Selected publications
- “‘A Very Queer Case”: Clementine Barnabet and the Erotics of a Sensationalized Voodoo Religion,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 26, no. 4 (2023): 58-84.
- “Shots of Deliverance: Mother Estella Boyd’s Healing Hands and Global Black Pentecostal Reach,” Journal of Africana Religions (2022) 10 (2): 149–173.
- “Black Church Rumor: Sexual Violence and Black (Gay) Gospel’s Reverend James Cleveland.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 28, no. 1 (2022): 115-144.
- “Anti-Commodified Black Studies and the Radical Roots of Black Christian Education,” Souls 22:1 (January-March 2021), 104-117.
- “Discredited Knowledges and Black Religious Ways of Knowing,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 9, no. 1 (2021): 41-49.
- “Wayward Negro Religions in the 20th Century Slum,” The Journal of African American History 106, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 117-21.
- “Black Religious Studies, Misogynoir, and the Matter of Breonna Taylor’s Death,” Religions 12:8 (2021), 621.
- “‘Queering’ African American Religious History,” Religion Compass (2019).
See also
- “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.
Support
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