Marcus L. Harvey, PhD

Associate Professor of Religious Studies

Contact Information

    Office Hours

    • Monday 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm
    • Wednesday 12:45 pm - 1:45 pm
    • Note:

     

    Dr. Harvey joined the religious studies faculty at the University of North Carolina Asheville in 2013, where he teaches courses on indigenous African and Africana religions, Zora Neale Hurston, literature and black religion, and religion and popular culture.

    Informed by fieldwork conducted in various areas of Ghana such as Accra, Kumasi, Larteh, Kwahu, Ananse Village, Koforidua, Asikuma, Mampong, and Cape Coast, as well as in 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. He places this work in conversation with black religion and literature in the United States as a means of challenging the common assumption that black religious experience is most legible within the hermeneutics of liberationist biblical imaginaries. Dr. Harvey is presently completing a book manuscript entitled “Life is War:” African Epistemology and Black Religious Hermeneutics.    

    Dr. Harvey’s intellectual work also engages the broader public sphere. He is co-creator and co-host of The Waters and Harvey Show, an NPR platform for in-depth conversations that address the often unacknowledged historical experience and cultural signature of black communities in western North Carolina as well as a range of vexing challenges facing other communities of color across the United States and abroad. The show airs Fridays at 9:00am and Saturdays at 3:00pm on Blue Ridge Public Radio. It is also accessible through on-demand listening at BPR.org and via podcast on the BPR and NPR mobile apps, Apple Podcasts, and Google Play.

     Education

    • PhD, Emory University, 2012

     Courses Taught

    • RELS 178: Religion and Film (First-Year Colloquium) (Honors and Non-Honors)
    • RELS 200: Introduction to the Study of Religion
    • RELS 373: African Religions in the Americas and the Caribbean
    • RELS 373: Zora Neale Hurston and Black Religion: Theoretical Foundations
    • RELS 374: Religion and the Paranormal in the Contemporary American Imagination (Honors)
    • RELS 398: Theory and Method in the Study of Religion
    • RELS 492: Senior Seminar in Religious Studies: Religion and African American Literature
    • HUM 414: Critical Perspectives on Contemporaneity

    This faculty member teaches in UNC Asheville's Humanities Program.

     Research and Teaching Interests

    • African and Africana Religious Thought
    • Phenomenology of Black Religion
    • Epistemology
    • Zora Neale Hurston and Black Folklore
    • Literature and Black Religion
    • Religion and Film

     Scholarly Publications and Presentations

    • "Gnostic and Epistemological Themes in African Traditional Religion." In The Palgrave Handbook of African Traditional Religion, edited by Ibigbolade Aderibigbe and Toyin Falola. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
    • “Ifá Divination Poetry.” In Global Humanities Reader: Engaging Ancient Worlds and Perspectives, edited by Keya Maitra, Katherine Zubko, and Brian Hook. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 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.
    • “We Come as Friends,” review of We Come as Friends by Hubert Sauper. Religious Studies Review 43, no. 1 (March 2017): 74.
    • “’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. Copyright 2016. This article is used by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press.
    • "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. Copyright 2016. This article is used by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press.
    • "Engaging the Òrìṣà: An Exploration of the Yorùbá Concepts of Ìbejì and Olókun as Theoretical Principles in Black Theology." Black TheologyAn International Journal 6, no. 1 (2008): 61-82.
    • “Zora Neale Hurston and the Frontier of Black Religious Hermeneutics.” Paper Presented at the Hurston on the Horizon Mini Conference, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, January 28-29, 2022. (Invited)
    • "Melville J. Herskovits, Africa, and the Black Religious Imagination." Paper Presented at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX, November 20-23, 2021. (Invited)
    • “’Suffering as Signal:’ Reflections on the Coronavirus Pandemic and Dagara Cosmology.” Paper Presented at the American Academy of Religion Virtual Annual Meeting, November 29-December 10, 2020. (Roundtable, Invited)
    • “What It Means to ‘Know’ in African Traditional Religion.” Paper Presented at the Nimi Wariboko Conference on Ethics, Economy, Society, Religion and African Social Traditions, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, November 21, 2020. (Invited)
    • “Knowing the Gods in Public: Akan Religion and the Question of Sociopolitical Relevance.” Paper Presented at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Symposium on Indigeneity, Religion, and Remaking the Public Sphere, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, December 5-6, 2019. (Invited)
    • “’It Is a Real Person Who Takes Bitter Medicine:’ Charting Components of a Trans-Diasporic Restorative Theory of Knowledge.” Paper Presented at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Denver, CO, November 17-20, 2018.
    • “The ‘Speech of Silence’ and Other Decolonizing Concepts: New Theoretical Horizons in Malidoma Somé’s Of Water and the Spirit.” Paper Presented at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, November 18-21, 2017.
    • "'If You Want to See Everything, You Become Blind': Phenomenological Epistemology as an Approach to the Study of Autochthonous African Spiritual Cultures." Paper Presented at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX, November 19-22, 2016.
    • “Ears to the Conch Shell, Feet to the Ancestors: Reimagining Asheville’s Goombay Festival.” Paper Presented at the African Americans in Western North Carolina Conference, Asheville, NC, October 22-23, 2015. (Invited)
    • “’Hard Skies’ and Bottomless Questions: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Epistemological ‘Opacity’ in Black Religious Experience.” Paper Presented at the National Association of African American Studies Conference, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 9-14, 2015.
    • “Yorùbá Cosmology as Epistemology and Cultural Matrix.” Paper Presented at the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for College and University Teachers (Theme: Black Aesthetics and African Centered Cultural Expressions: Sacred Systems in the Nexus between Cultural Studies, Religion and Philosophy), Emory University, Atlanta, GA, July 13-August 1, 2014. (Invited)
    • “Approaching Yorùbá Epistemology: A Heuristic Investigation.” Paper Presented at the Òrìṣà World Congress, Ọbáfẹ́mi Awólọ́wọ̀ University, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria, July 24-28, 2013. (Invited)
    • "Engaging the Òrìṣà: An Exploration of the Yorùbá Concepts of Ìbejì and Olókun as Theoretical Principles in Black Theology." Paper Presented at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, November 18-21, 2006.

    Website

    mlharvey.com