Princeton University

Wallace Best joined the faculty in 2007. His research and teaching center on African American religious history, religion and literature, Pentecostalism, the Nation of Islam, religion, gender and sexuality, and Womanist theology. He is the author of Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952, Princeton University Press. He is currently at work on two books: an anthology entitled Elder Lucy Smith: Documents from the Life of a Pentecostal Woman Preacher and an exploration of the religious thought of the poet Langston Hughes, entitled Langston's Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem.  In 2009-10 he serves as Director of Graduate Studies.