Scholar Spotlight: Marcus Harvey
“I explore the world of traditional African ideas and consider their relevance for how African Americans make sense of their religious history and experience in the United States.”
Marcus Harvey
Assistant professor
Department of Religious Studies
With a focus on the ancestral religions of the Akan and Yorùbá peoples of southern Ghana and southwestern Nigeria, I examine creation myths, ritual practices, field interviews with traditionally initiated priests, and other scholarly research, along with the works of black writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, whose understanding of black life and experience is influenced by her study of African-inspired traditions in Haiti, Jamaica, the southern United States, and elsewhere.
My research brings together the phenomenology of religion, history of religions, epistemology, and other methods in an effort to illumine fundamental philosophical themes that shape religious cultures.
My work contributes to the formation of Africana religious studies, a new and emerging subfield within the study of religion. Part of what makes the work exciting is that it challenges centuries of Afrophobic thinking in Western popular culture, which continually recycles a master narrative about indigenous Africa being culturally and economically impoverished, perpetually diseased, politically corrupt, and mired in civil war, with little or nothing to offer the world by way of ideas, theoretical insight, philosophical wisdom, and ethical guidance.
Why I Do What I Do
Through a graduate course on African thought and subsequent research trips to various African countries I discovered a complex and formidable universe of African ideas, often embedded in what we in the West call religion.
Currently Working On
Completing a book manuscript titled “Life is War”: African Epistemology and Black Religious Phenomenology.
By Amy Beth Miller