Biography
Ahmad Greene-Hayes is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Religion at Princeton University in the Religion in the Americas subfield, and an interdisciplinary scholar pursuing graduate certificates from the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. His specialization is twentieth century African American religious history, and his work is principally located in Black South Studies and Black Queer Studies. He is the past recipient of fellowships and awards from the Ford Foundation, the American Academy of Religion, the Mellon Mays Foundation, and the LGBT Studies Research Fellowship at Yale University. Ahmad has forthcoming journal articles in GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies; Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society; and The Journal of African American History.
Research
Gods of the Flesh: Religion, Sexuality, and Circum-Caribbean Migration in Black New Orleans, 1900-1940 is about the African diasporic religious cultures and sexual politics that emerged in New Orleans—a vibrant, American port city—amidst the migration of African Americans, West Indians, and Central Americans to the region in the early twentieth century. It looks at these changes in light of the different kinds of policing enforced by white American Christians and different Black constituencies in New Orleans, and it considers the religious, sexual, and transnational resistance politics theologized by Black migrants, political organizations, storefront churches, “cults,” sex workers, “queers,” and others who intently defied white American Christian hegemony. It draws from a wide range of sources, including but not limited to city, parish, police, immigration, census, church, and Works Progress Administration records to narrate the historical experiences of many religious actors often eclipsed by prominent preachers, institutions, and leaders in the study of African American religions in twentieth-century urban history. The first part of the project examines Jim Crow legal sanctions against African diasporic religions and how people of African descent cultivated their own religions and sexual politics despite these social and legal conditions. The second part examines racializing discourses imbricated in these religions and highlights people of African descent’s intellectual engagement with what Greene-Hayes terms, “Black transnational theologies.”
