Yale University

Graduate Student, Divinity School

About

Jason Craige Harris is a third-year master's candidate in Black Religion in the African Diaspora and a Marquand merit scholar at Yale Divinity School, where he was recently awarded the Mary Cady Tew Prize for exceptional ability in history and ethics. He earned a bachelor’s in religion and African-American studies from Wesleyan University and received the Giffin Prize for excellence in the Study of Religion, Spurrier Award for ethics, and an official citation for academic excellence issued by the 2009 Connecticut General Assembly. As a fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities and a recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Harris wrote a senior honors thesis analyzing theological anthropologies along political and racial fault lines in U.S. Evangelical history.

His research and writing are principally concerned with black life, Christianity, (post)colonialism, empire, violence, feminisms, critical social theory, and ultimately planetary flourishing. Concerns arising from the academic study of Black religion, Black ethics, Black political theory, and Black feminisms particularly inform his inquiries. Through an interdisciplinary framework, he probes the systems of values and (popular and elite forms of) moral discourses that undergird dominant epistemological, rhetorical, cultural, political, and religious forms to determine to what extent they impede the realization of robust conceptions of justice and freedom. With an eye toward contemporary social problems, he considers the religious strategies and visions that historically marginalized peoples have created to respond to conditions of living and being delimited by restrictive understandings of race, gender, religion, and nation.

He is a general editor at the Journal of Postcolonial Networks, where, among other things, he helps to facilitate conversations on race and postcolonial/liberation theologies. He also serves as the secretary for the board of Postcolonial Networks as well as a board member for Evangelicals for Justice. As a Christian minister and budding public intellectual, Harris seeks and invites others into more holistic and attuned, less violent and constrained, ways of narrating the self and the divine.

Areas of Interest and Research:

African American Religious Studies
Black Studies
Africana Philosophy
Comparative Moral and Social Thought
Theologies and theories of Race, Gender, Sexuality, Class, Nation, the Body, Affect, and Justice
Evangelicalisms and Pentecostalisms
Liberation and Postcolonial Theologies
Theodicy, Moral Evil, and Social Suffering
Christian Social Ethics
Religion and Public Life
Critical Social Theory, Anti-oppression Education
Feminisms
Democratic Theory
Rhetoric and Discourse Analysis
Method and Theory in the Study of Religion
Creative Nonfiction