Marcus L. Harvey
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Marcus L. Harvey
Assistant Professor
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, 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 Phenomenology, 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, 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 the study of religion, and religion and film. Among the various courses Harvey presently teaches at UTK are African Religions, African Religions in the Western Imagination, and Religion and American Horror.
Education
PhD, Emory University, 2013
BA, Morehouse College, 2001
Selected Publications
- Gnostic and Epistemological Themes in African Traditional Religion.” In The Palgrave Handbook of African Traditional Religion, edited by Ibigbolade Aderibigbe and Toyin Falola, 535-546. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
- “From the Sacred Sound of the Conch Shell to the Cemetery Dance: Reimagining an Africana Festival Created in a Southern Appalachian City.” Special Issue, Race and Religion: New Approaches to African American Religions, Religions 8, no. 8 (2017): 1-30. doi: 10.3390/rel8080149.
- “’Hard Skies’ and Bottomless Questions: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Epistemological ‘Opacity’ in Black Religious Experience.” Journal of Africana Religions 4, no. 2 (2016): 186-214.
- “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”). Estudos de Religião 29, no. 2 (2015): 237-270.
- “Medial Deities and Relational Meanings: Tracing Elements of an Akan Grammar of Knowing.” Journal of Africana Religions 3, no. 4 (2015): 397-441.