Faculty Spotlight: Marcus Harvey
Marcus Harvey joined the Department of Religious Studies in fall 2023 as an assistant professor of the religions of Africa and its diaspora. He comes to UT from the University of North Carolina Asheville, where he served on the religious studies faculty beginning in 2013. Prior to that, he earned his PhD with distinction from Emory University’s Graduate Division of Religion. He teaches courses on African indigenous and diaspora religions, Zora Neale Hurston and religious thought in black literature (including folklore), and religion and horror.
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, 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. Harvey’s research also appears in such journals as the Journal of Africana Religions, Estudos de Religião, and Religions.
Earlier this year, Harvey presented his research at a national conference and is scheduled to present again at a second conference this fall. In previous years, his research has been presented internationally as well. Beyond his central research focus, Harvey also has an abiding fascination with the horror genre in its various cinematic forms. Of great interest to him are the ways horror movies often disclose the religio-cultural foundations of popular fears.