Ahmad Greene-Hayes

Ahmad Greene-Hayes

2024-2025 Fellow

Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Ph.D. is assistant professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School and a member of the Standing Committee for the Study of Religion and the Standing Committee on Advanced Degrees in American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. A social historian and critical theorist, Greene-Hayes is an accomplished scholar and teacher, and his research interests include critical Black Studies, Black Atlantic Religions in the Americas, and race, queerness, and sexuality in the context of African American and Caribbean religious histories. He is the author of Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New Orleans, which is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in the Class 200: New Studies in Religion series in early 2025, and he has published essays in the Journal of Africana Religions, Nova Religio, GLQ, and the Journal of African American History, among others. Greene-Hayes has held prestigious fellowships from Yale’s LGBT Studies program, the American Society of Church History, and Princeton’s “The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures,” to name a few. In 2022, he was inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College, and in 2023, he was inducted into the historic Society for the Study of Black Religion. Dr. Greene-Hayes is a steering committee member for both the Afro-American Religious History Unit and the Religion and Sexuality Unit at the American Academy of Religion, and he served as an advisory board member for the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network from 2019-2024. In conversation with his research, he has consulted and collaborated with the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice at Columbia University, the African American Policy Forum, Black Women’s Blueprint, and a host of other nonprofit organizations, churches, and other community institutions. While at the ISM, he will be working on his current book project exploring the life of Little Richard through the lens of Black religion and sexuality.