Dr. Harvey joined the religious studies faculty at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2023, where he teaches courses on African indigenous and diaspora religions, religious theory in the works of Zora Neale Hurston (including folklore), and religion and popular culture. Prior to his arrival, he served for ten years as a full-time faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Asheville.
Informed by fieldwork conducted between 2013-2014 in Ghana, specifically Accra, Kumasi, Larteh, Kwahu, Ananse Village, Koforidua, Asikuma, Mampong, and Cape Coast, as well as the Nigerian cities of Lagos, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, and Modakeke, Dr. Harvey’s research explores sacred matrices of knowledge production among the Akan of southern Ghana and the Yorùbá of southwestern Nigeria, two of the largest ethnic groups in each country. The book he is currently completing, titled “Life is War”: African Epistemology and Black Religious Hermeneutics, places this work in conversation with black religion and literature in the United States as a means of challenging the assumption that black religious experience is most legible within the hermeneutics of liberationist biblical imaginaries.
Some of Dr. Harvey’s scholarly publications include “Gnostic and Epistemological Themes in African Traditional Religion,” in The Palgrave Handbook of African Traditional Religion; "From the Sacred Sound of the Conch Shell to the Cemetery Dance: Reimagining an Africana Festival Created in a Southern Appalachian City"; “’Hard Skies’ and Bottomless Questions: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Epistemological ‘Opacity’ in Black Religious Experience”; "Deity from a Python, Earth from a Hen, Humankind from Mystery: Narrative and Knowledge in Yorùbá Cosmology" ("Divindade de uma Píton, Terra de uma Galinha, Humanidade do Mistério: Narrativa e Conhecimento na Cosmologia Iorubá"); and "Medial Deities and Relational Meanings: Tracing Elements of an Akan Grammar of Knowing".
Dr. Harvey’s intellectual work also engages the broader public sphere. He is co-creator and co-host of The Waters and Harvey Show, an NPR platform for in-depth conversations that address the often unacknowledged historical experience and cultural signature of black communities in western North Carolina as well as a range of vexing challenges facing other communities of color across the United States and abroad. The show airs Fridays at 9:00am and Saturdays at 3:00pm on Blue Ridge Public Radio. It is also accessible through on-demand listening at BPR.org and via podcast on the BPR and NPR mobile apps, Apple Podcasts, and Google Play.
