Vaughn A. Booker

Distinguished Junior External Fellow
Department of African and African American Studies and the Department of Religion, Dartmouth College

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

Publications and Projects

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)

"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)

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