A specialist in African indigenous and diaspora religions, Marcus Harvey joined the religious studies faculty in fall 2023. Informed by fieldwork conducted 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. Some of his scholarship has appeared in The Journal of Africana Religions, Estudos de Religião, Religions, and The Palgrave Handbook of African Traditional Religion. His current book project, titled “Life is War”: African Epistemology and Black Religious Hermeneutics, places Akan and Yorùbá theories of knowledge 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 liberationist interpretive frameworks undergirded by biblical imaginaries.

Before coming to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Dr. Harvey was an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, where he taught courses on Afro-Atlantic religions, Zora Neale Hurston and black folk epistemology, theory and method in religious studies, religion and film, and more. Among the courses Dr. Harvey presently teaches at the University of Tennessee are Vodou Gods and Atlantic Perils: African Religions in the New World, African Religions in the Western Imagination, and Religion and American Horror.