Ahmad Greene-Hayes
On leave
Fall 2026
Education
- BA, Williams College
- MA, Princeton University
- PhD, Princeton University
Profile
Ahmad Greene-Hayes is Associate Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School. An accomplished scholar and teacher, he specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-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 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). 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, the Journal of African American History, and Southern Cultures, among others. Alongside Drs. Judith Weisenfeld, Vaughn Booker, and Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, Greene-Hayes is the co-editor of Africana Religions in America and the Challenges of History (forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press). Greene-Hayes is currently the managing editor of the Journal of Africana Religions, and he serves as co-chair of the Afro-American Religious History Unit of the American Academy of Religion, and as Member-at-Large on the Executive Committee of the Society for the Study of Black Religion. In recognition of his research, he was most recently 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.”
For more information, please visit www.ahmadgreene.com.
Selected publications
- “Bottled Up: Booze, Blues, and Black Religion in the Jim Crow South,” Southern Cultures 32, no. 3 (2026): 12-25.
- “Booker T. Washington’s Protestant Coloniality in the Afterlife of the Plantation,” Harvard Theological Review 119, no. 2 (2026): 171–94.
- “Hair, Roots, and Crystal Balls: Archival Viscerality, Black Conjuring Traditions, and the Study of American Religions,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 91, no. 4 (December 2023), 798–819.
- “Shots of Deliverance: Mother Estella Boyd’s Healing Hands and Global Black Pentecostal Reach,” Journal of Africana Religions (2022) 10 (2): 149–173.
- “Discredited Knowledges and Black Religious Ways of Knowing,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 9, no. 1 (2021): 41-49.
- “Anti-Commodified Black Studies and the Radical Roots of Black Christian Education,” Souls 22:1 (January-March 2021), 104-117.
Courses
View HDS courses taught by Ahmad Greene-Hayes in my.Harvard.
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.)
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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