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Black Sacred Arts: Annual Conference Series

Beginning in 2022 with Africana Sacred Healing Arts, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music launched a series of annual conferences to study the music, ritual, and related arts of religious cultures of the Black Atlantic and beyond. Each meeting in this conference series convenes an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and practitioners around a theme central to the research of Black expressive cultures to facilitate discussion across a number of regions, disciplines, and forms of ritual and religious practice. The interactions in this series highlight, uncover, and engage links between Africa, the Americas, the circum-Caribbean and beyond, drawing on influential studies of Black Atlantic religions but also eager to discover new locations in the fields of Black religion and the arts. The disciplinary ground that this conference series engages is similarly broad, as we seek perspectives from historical study, ethnographic research, performance analysis, and fields studying the links between liturgy, religion and the related arts. The conversations envisioned in this series will place Black thought, worship, and practice in dialogue with multi-religious perspectives that are linked with the arts.