The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, is pleased to host the concluding seminar of its Spring 2025 Faculty Seminar Series.
Dianne Marie Stewart—Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Emory University—and Tracey E. Hucks—Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies, Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study—will present “African Heritage Religions in Trinidad and the Quest for Religious Freedom and Public Legitimacy” on Monday, May 26, 2025 (12:00 noon – 2:00 PM) at The Africa Institute Auditorium (location map).
The session is free and open to the public. Register to attend.
Despite the measures European colonizing regimes took to repress African religiosity in the Americas and the Caribbean, the West African Yorùbá-Òrìṣà spiritual heritage has left an indelible imprint upon the religious cultures of African descendants. Although studies of such spiritual legacies in the African diaspora emphasize Brazil and Cuba, custodians of Yorùbá-Òrìṣà religion in Trinidad have experienced unparalleled success in their struggles to overcome colonial legacies of religious repression.
This two-part lecture examines their quest for religious autonomy in the 19th and 20th centuries through an Africana Religious Studies framework that:
(1) privileges “lived religion” as both an approach to practices of resistance and practices of repression;
(2) offers a culturally attentive historical contextualization of Trinidad’s Yorùbá-Òrìṣà tradition; and
(3) contributes to Longian (Charles Long) theories of Black religion by analyzing how devotees remember, conceptualize, and deploy Africa as a spiritually and politically mobilizing symbol.
Tracey E. Hucks is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She most recently served as Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Colgate University, where she held the James A. Storing Chair in Religion and Africana and Latin American Studies. Professor Hucks has also held faculty appointments at Davidson College and Haverford College, where she chaired both the Africana Studies and Religion departments and currently serves on the Corporation and Board of Managers.
A graduate of Colgate University, Professor Hucks earned her MA and Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a resident graduate scholar at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. She is the author of Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism (2012), a finalist for the American Academy of Religion First Book Award, and the Journal of Africana Religions’ Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize. Her most recent book, Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad: Volume One: Africans in the White Colonial Imagination (2022), examines the history of religious repression in colonial Trinidad through the lens of legal and cultural archives.
Professor Hucks’s recent publications include “Kalunga Crossings: Waterscapes of Terror and ‘Teachment’ in the African Atlantic World” (with Dianne M. Stewart, Yale Journal of Music and Religion) and “If These Waters Could Talk”: Emmett Till and the Terror of Diaspora Waters” (forthcoming in a volume edited by George D. Yancy and A. Todd Franklin). She is widely recognized for her scholarship on theory and method in Africana religious studies, religion and nationalism, and healing traditions across the African diaspora, drawing from research across Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Americas.
Dianne Marie Stewart is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University, specializing in African-heritage religious cultures in the Caribbean and the Americas. She earned her B.A. from Colgate University in English and African American Studies, her M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School, and her Ph.D. in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary in New York, where she studied with leading scholars such as Delores Williams, James Washington, and James Cone.
Since joining Emory in 2001, Professor Stewart has taught in both undergraduate and graduate programs. Her research spans Africana religions, womanist religious thought, theory and method in Africana religious studies, and the influence of African civilizations on diasporic religious formations. Her first book is titled Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (Oxford University Press, 2005).
Professor Stewart’s second monograph, Black Women, Black Love: America’s War on African American Marriage (Seal Press, 2020), examines four centuries of structural obstacles to Black women’s intimate lives in the U.S., revealing how white supremacy has fractured African American family life. Her most recent book, co-authored with Professor Tracey Hucks, is titled Obeah, Orisa and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II: Orisa—Africana Nations and the Power of Black Sacred Imagination (Duke University Press, 2022).
A former Fulbright Scholar and recipient of numerous teaching and mentorship awards, Professor Stewart was named a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow to support her current book project, Local and Transnational Legacies of African Christianity in West-Central Africa and the Black Atlantic World. She is also a founding co-editor of the Duke University Press series Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People and an active member of several academic guilds.
John Thabiti Willis is a scholar specializing in Africa’s social and cultural history in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. He is an Associate Professor of History at The Africa Institute, GSU. Read full profile.
Through these lectures and workshops, The Africa Institute (GSU) reaffirms its mission as a center for African and diaspora studies, committed to training a new generation of critical thinkers.
The seminar will be in English.
The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, is pleased to host the concluding seminar of its Spring 2025 Faculty Seminar Series.
The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, is pleased to host the concluding seminar of its Spring 2025 Faculty Seminar Series.
Dianne Marie Stewart—Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Emory University—and Tracey E. Hucks—Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies, Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study—will present “African Heritage Religions in Trinidad and the Quest for Religious Freedom and Public Legitimacy” on Monday, May 26, 2025 (12:00 noon – 2:00 PM) at The Africa Institute Auditorium (location map).
The session is free and open to the public. Register to attend.
Despite the measures European colonizing regimes took to repress African religiosity in the Americas and the Caribbean, the West African Yorùbá-Òrìṣà spiritual heritage has left an indelible imprint upon the religious cultures of African descendants. Although studies of such spiritual legacies in the African diaspora emphasize Brazil and Cuba, custodians of Yorùbá-Òrìṣà religion in Trinidad have experienced unparalleled success in their struggles to overcome colonial legacies of religious repression.
This two-part lecture examines their quest for religious autonomy in the 19th and 20th centuries through an Africana Religious Studies framework that:
(1) privileges “lived religion” as both an approach to practices of resistance and practices of repression;
(2) offers a culturally attentive historical contextualization of Trinidad’s Yorùbá-Òrìṣà tradition; and
(3) contributes to Longian (Charles Long) theories of Black religion by analyzing how devotees remember, conceptualize, and deploy Africa as a spiritually and politically mobilizing symbol.
Tracey E. Hucks is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She most recently served as Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Colgate University, where she held the James A. Storing Chair in Religion and Africana and Latin American Studies. Professor Hucks has also held faculty appointments at Davidson College and Haverford College, where she chaired both the Africana Studies and Religion departments and currently serves on the Corporation and Board of Managers.
A graduate of Colgate University, Professor Hucks earned her MA and Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a resident graduate scholar at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. She is the author of Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism (2012), a finalist for the American Academy of Religion First Book Award, and the Journal of Africana Religions’ Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize. Her most recent book, Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad: Volume One: Africans in the White Colonial Imagination (2022), examines the history of religious repression in colonial Trinidad through the lens of legal and cultural archives.
Professor Hucks’s recent publications include “Kalunga Crossings: Waterscapes of Terror and ‘Teachment’ in the African Atlantic World” (with Dianne M. Stewart, Yale Journal of Music and Religion) and “If These Waters Could Talk”: Emmett Till and the Terror of Diaspora Waters” (forthcoming in a volume edited by George D. Yancy and A. Todd Franklin). She is widely recognized for her scholarship on theory and method in Africana religious studies, religion and nationalism, and healing traditions across the African diaspora, drawing from research across Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Americas.
Dianne Marie Stewart is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University, specializing in African-heritage religious cultures in the Caribbean and the Americas. She earned her B.A. from Colgate University in English and African American Studies, her M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School, and her Ph.D. in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary in New York, where she studied with leading scholars such as Delores Williams, James Washington, and James Cone.
Since joining Emory in 2001, Professor Stewart has taught in both undergraduate and graduate programs. Her research spans Africana religions, womanist religious thought, theory and method in Africana religious studies, and the influence of African civilizations on diasporic religious formations. Her first book is titled Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (Oxford University Press, 2005).
Professor Stewart’s second monograph, Black Women, Black Love: America’s War on African American Marriage (Seal Press, 2020), examines four centuries of structural obstacles to Black women’s intimate lives in the U.S., revealing how white supremacy has fractured African American family life. Her most recent book, co-authored with Professor Tracey Hucks, is titled Obeah, Orisa and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II: Orisa—Africana Nations and the Power of Black Sacred Imagination (Duke University Press, 2022).
A former Fulbright Scholar and recipient of numerous teaching and mentorship awards, Professor Stewart was named a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow to support her current book project, Local and Transnational Legacies of African Christianity in West-Central Africa and the Black Atlantic World. She is also a founding co-editor of the Duke University Press series Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People and an active member of several academic guilds.
John Thabiti Willis is a scholar specializing in Africa’s social and cultural history in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. He is an Associate Professor of History at The Africa Institute, GSU. Read full profile.
Through these lectures and workshops, The Africa Institute (GSU) reaffirms its mission as a center for African and diaspora studies, committed to training a new generation of critical thinkers.
The seminar will be in English.
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