Dr. Marcus L. Harvey, Assistant Professor for Religious Studies, is a specialist in African indigenous and diaspora religions after conducting fieldwork in many towns throughout Ghana and Nigeria. His research explores sacred matrices of knowledge among the Akan of southern Ghana and the Yorùbá of southwestern Nigeria. Some of Dr. Harvey’s work has appeared in The Journal of Africana Religions, Estudos de Religião, Religions, and The Palgrave Handbook of African Traditional Religion. His current book project, Life is War: African Epistemology and Black Religious Hermeneutics explores Akan and Yorùbá theories of knowledge and black religion and literature in the United States.

Some of the courses Dr. Harvey currently teaches at the University of Tennessee include Vodou Gods and Atlantic Perils: African Religions in the New World, African Religions in the Western Imagination, and Religion and American Horror.