Scholarly Presentations

  • “Zora Neale Hurston and the Frontier of Black Religious Hermeneutics.” Paper Presented at the Hurston on the Horizon Mini Conference, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, January 28-29, 2022. (Invited)

  • "Melville J. Herskovits, Africa, and the Black Religious Imagination." Paper Presented at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX, November 20-23, 2021. (Invited)

  • “‘Suffering as Signal:’ Reflections on the Coronavirus Pandemic and Dagara Cosmology.” Paper Presented at the American Academy of Religion Virtual Annual Meeting, November 29-December 10, 2020. (Invited)

  • “What It Means to ‘Know’ in African Traditional Religion.” Paper Presented at the Nimi Wariboko Conference on Ethics, Economy, Society, Religion, and African Social Traditions, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, November 21, 2020. (Invited)

  • “Knowing the Gods in Public: Akan Religion and the Question of Sociopolitical Relevance.” Paper Presented at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Symposium on Indigeneity, Religion, and Remaking the Public Sphere, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, December 5-6, 2019. (Invited)

  • “’It Is a Real Person Who Takes Bitter Medicine:’ Charting Components of a Trans-Diasporic Restorative Theory of Knowledge.” Paper Presented at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Denver, CO, November 17-20, 2018.

  • “The ‘Speech of Silence’ and Other Decolonizing Concepts: New Theoretical Horizons in Malidoma Somé’s Of Water and the Spirit.” Paper Presented at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, November 18-21, 2017.

  • "'If You Want to See Everything, You Become Blind': Phenomenological Epistemology as an Approach to the Study of Autochthonous African Spiritual Cultures." Paper Presented at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX, November 19-22, 2016.

  • “Ears to the Conch Shell, Feet to the Ancestors: Reimagining Asheville’s Goombay Festival.” Paper Presented at the African Americans in Western North Carolina Conference, Asheville, NC, October 22-23, 2015. (Invited)

  • “’Hard Skies’ and Bottomless Questions: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Epistemological ‘Opacity’ in Black Religious Experience.” Paper Presented at the National Association of African American Studies Conference, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 9-14, 2015.

  • “Yorùbá Cosmology as Epistemology and Cultural Matrix.” Paper Presented at the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for College and University Teachers (Theme: Black Aesthetics and African Centered Cultural Expressions: Sacred Systems in the Nexus between Cultural Studies, Religion and Philosophy), Emory University, Atlanta, GA, July 13-August 1, 2014. (Invited)

  • “Approaching Yorùbá Epistemology: A Heuristic Investigation.” Paper Presented at the Òrìṣà World Congress, Ọbáfẹ́mi Awólọ́wọ̀ University, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria, July 24-28, 2013. (Invited)

  • "Engaging the Òrìṣà: An Exploration of the Yorùbá Concepts of Ìbejì and Olókun as Theoretical Principles in Black Theology." Paper Presented at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, November 18-21, 2006.

Public Lectures

  • “’The Thing That Knowledge Can’t Eat:’ Malidoma Somé and the Future of Africana Religious Studies.” Lecture, Jerry

    Jackson Lecture Series, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC, November 8, 2018. (Invited)