My research and teaching deploy a wide range of texts (including literature, vernacular music, preaching, and performance) to discern ways in which religious thought, belief, and practice both contribute to and are generated by the formation of diverse American cultures in the US and around the world. My recent work explores certain religious and theological dimensions of the concept of race, tracing critical religious terms of its development and cultural expression in American, African-American, and global contexts.
Toward these ends my first book, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology (NYU 2017), marshals archival research, close readings, and studies in religion, literature, and secularism, aiming broadly at two objectives:
- It highlights the transformative perspectives that religious and theological studies can bring to prominent, yet problematic figures like Ellison, whose work defies more ordinary categories of cultural assessment, and
- stakes the larger and equally ambitious claim that Ellison’s literary conception of race—a thoroughly ‘secular’ category—articulates an ‘invisible theology’ that proves indispensable for negotiating changing dynamics of racial identity and the terms of its representation amid the ambiguities of its twenty-first-century contexts.
