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faculty assistant
Jacob K. Olupona, who joined the Faculty of Divinity and Faculty of Arts and
Sciences in 2006, is a noted scholar of indigenous African religions who comes to Harvard from the University of California,
Davis. His current research focuses on the religious practices of the estimated one million Africans
who have emigrated to the United States over the last 40 years, examining in particular several populations that remain
relatively invisible in the American religious landscape:
"reverse missionaries" who have come to the U.S. to establish churches, African Pentecostals in American congregations,
American branches of independent African churches, and indigenous African religious communities in the U.S. His earlier research
ranged across African spirituality and ritual practices, spirit possession, Pentecostalism, Yoruba festivals, animal symbolism,
icons, phenomenology, and religious pluralism in Africa and the Americas. In his forthcoming book
Ile-Ife: The City of 201 Gods, he examines the modern urban mixing of ritual, royalty, gender, class, and power, and how
the structure, content, and meaning of religious beliefs and practices permeate daily life. He has authored or edited seven
other books, including, most recently, African Immigrant Religions in America, co-edited with Regina Germignani. His
Kingship, Religion and Rituals in a Nigerian Community: A Phenomenological Study of Ondo Yoruba
Festivals has become a model for ethnographic research among Yoruba-speaking communities. Olupona has received
prestigious grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Ford Foundation, the Davis
Humanities Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Getty Foundation. He has served
on the editorial boards of three influential journals and as president of the African Association for the Study of Religion.
In 2000, Olupona received an honorary doctorate in divinity from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and in 2007
he received the Nigerian National Order of Merit, that country's prestigious award given each year for intellectual accomplishment
in the four areas of science, medicine, engineering/technology, and humanities.
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