Vaughn A. Booker is associate professor of African and African American studies and religion at Dartmouth College. A historian of African American religion who focuses on the twentieth century, his first book is Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century (NYU Press, 2020).
SHC Project
From the Back of the Church: A History of Irreverent Religion in African American Life
Booker's second book project, From the Back of the Church: A History of Irreverent Religion in African American Life, Emancipation to the Present, explores how African American Christians have created and sustained cultural traditions of religious humor that parallel traditions critical of belief. His project centers the ways that African Americans have embraced irreverence, from Emancipation to the present, to understand the persistence of African American religious life and the persistence of comedy about this important facet of Black culture. The book will establish irreverence as a mode of religious affiliation/belonging in African American history.
Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century (New York: New York University Press, July 2020) (also on Amazon)
- Finalist for the 2021 Religion and the Arts Book Award, American Academy of Religion
"Mothers of the Movement: Evangelicalism and Religious Experience in Black Women's Activism," in 'Evangelicalism: New Directions in Scholarship,' ed. Randall Balmer and Edward J. Blum, Special issue of Religions 12 (2), 141 (2021): available https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/2/141/htm.
"'Deplorable Exegesis': Dick Gregory's Irreverent Scriptural Authority in the 1960s and 1970s," Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 30.2 (2020): 1-50, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/religion-and-american-culture/ar...
"'Pulpit and Pew': African American Humor on Irreverent Religious Participation in Negro Digest, 1943-1950," Journal of Africana Religions 8.1 (2020): 1-36, available https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jafrireli.8.1.0001. (PDF available here)