The ARGC Welcomes Professor Lerone A. Martin and Professor Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh
The members of the American Religions in a Global Context Initiative are thrilled to welcome Dr. Lerone A. Martin and Dr. Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh to Stanford.
Professor Wells-Oghoghomeh joined Stanford in September 2021 as an Assistant Professor in the Religious Studies Department and an IDEAL faculty recruit. Professor Martin arrives in January 2022 as the incoming Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, an Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor. Both will be integral members of the ARGC leadership team going forward, bringing strengths in the study of African American religion, religion and race, media and politics, and gender and embodiment to the ARGC community.
Professor Wells-Oghoghomeh specializes in the religious cultures of enslaved people, especially women, in the U.S. South and African Atlantic. Her first book, The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2021. Dr. Sylvester Johnson writes that the book “answers the call for more creative methods of interpretation and bold efforts to thoughtfully and deliberately render the agency, epistemology, and larger lifeworlds of those who were forced into the most violent forms of domination.” Professor Wells-Oghoghomeh is now working on a transatlantic history of “witchcraft” as a gendered and racialized category.
Professor Martin specializes in the history of religion, race, politics, and media in the twentieth century. He is the author of the award-winning Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion, published by New York University Press in 2014. The book received the 2015 first book award from the American Society of Church History, the guild affiliate of the American Historical Association, and the 2015 Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. Dr. Marla Frederick describes Preaching on Wax as a “must read!” that is “important and timely” and “insists that we reframe our understanding of the spiritual impulses, racial politics, and commercial influences that mediate a rich strand of African American religion.” Professor Martin is finishing a second book, The Gospel According to J. Edgar Hoover: The FBI and the Making of White Evangelicalism, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.
Members of the ARGC community welcome Professors Martin and Wells-Oghoghomeh with excitement and enthusiasm. ARGC Director Kathryn Gin Lum is ecstatic to take the Initiative into the future with colleagues who are not only at the forefront of the field and whose work she so admires but who also share in the ARGC’s spirit of collaboration and community-building. Together with her colleagues, she looks forward to cementing Stanford as a premier place to study American religion and race in a global context.
Other members of the ARGC community are similarly excited about the arrival of Professors Wells-Oghoghomeh and Martin at Stanford. Dr. Joel Cabrita, Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Center for African Studies, says, “I am truly delighted to have both Profs. Martin and Well-Oghoghomeh joining our community of scholars at Stanford. Prof. Martin’s work on religion and technology is of great interest to me, given my own longstanding interest in religion and media in Africa. Prof. Wells-Oghoghomeh’s research on women’s experiences in African American Christianity sheds light on the centrality of gender, sexuality, and the body to global Christianity.” Dr. Barbara Pitkin, Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies, who coordinates the faculty/grad colloquia and supervises undergraduate research for the department, notes that “Alexis and Lerone will offer new courses that will enrich the Religious Studies curriculum at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. In particular, I’m excited to see the new research opportunities these appointments open up for our majors working on senior capstones.”
The graduate student members of the ARGC are eager to take classes with and learn from such eminent scholars in the field. Fifth-year PhD student jem Jebbia says: “Dr. Wells-Oghoghomeh and Dr. Martin offer stellar contributions to the ARGC program because their work is both focused and broad. Dr. Wells-Oghoghomeh draws on under-studied sources and figures that the field of Religious Studies should uphold as agents of religious engagement, and Dr. Martin draws on interdisciplinary methods to make essential connections between what we might consider the physical ‘Americas’ and its global influence in religion, politics, and social history. I’m so excited to learn from their expertise in religious studies, and to welcome them to this growing community of scholars interested in discussing the importance of religion in current issues.”
Third-year PhD student Chanhee Heo is “thrilled that Professor Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh and Professor Lerone A. Martin have recently joined Stanford’s Religious Studies Department. Their nuanced and layered scholarship and teaching will broaden and deepen American Religions at Stanford, and in turn offer me opportunities to grow and complicate my own inquiries into race, religion, and gender.”
And first-year Ph.D. student Valeria Vergani is “delighted that Professors Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh and Lerone Martin will be joining the Stanford community of ARGC in the upcoming year. Their innovative work and their deep commitment to the study of religion, race and politics in North America will add great diversity and wisdom to our ongoing conversations on American religions, and their support and guidance will be tremendously helpful to all members of ARGC. I look forward to welcoming them, learning from them, and seeing how our scholarly community continues to grow in the next years.”
Welcome, Professor Martin and Professor Wells-Oghoghomeh!
