Curriculum Vita

Books:

• Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion
  in American Film, 1929-1949
  (University of California Press, 2007)

Reviewed in:

• American Historical Review
• Church History
• Film Quarterly
• Journal of African American History
• Journal of American History
• Reviews in American History

• African-American Women and Christian Activism:
  New York's Black YWCA, 1905-1945
  (Harvard University Press, 1997)
• This Far By Faith: Readings in African American Women's
  Religious Biography
  (Routledge, 1996), co-edited with Richard Newman

Editorial Projects:

• Exhibit Curator: "Saturday Sinners and Sunday Saints:
  Black Religion in Film" for Separate Cinema: The Art of Black Film Posters
• The North Star: A Journal of African-American Religious History
  Founder and editor (1997-2005)
• Co-editor of special issue (with Priscilla Wald and Christine DiStefano) on
  "Institutions, Regulation, and Social Control,”
  of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24: 4 (Summer 1999)
  

Recent Book Chapters:

• “The Silent Social Problem Film: Regeneration (1915),” in Colleen McDannell, ed.,
  Catholics in the Movies (Oxford University Press, 2007)
• "Truths That Liberate the Soul: Eva Jessye and the Politics of Religious Performance,"
  in R. Marie Griffith and Barbara Dianne Savage, eds., Women and Religion in the African Diaspora
  (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006)
• "Projecting Blackness: African-American Religion in the Hollywood Imagination,"
  in Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister, eds., Race, Nation and Religion in the Americas
  (Oxford University Press, 2004)
• “Universal in Spirit, Local in Character: The Riverside Church and New York City,”
  in Peter J. Paris, James Hudnut-Beumler, John W. Cook, Lawrence Mamiya, Nora Tubbs Tisdale,
  Judith Weisenfeld, The History of the Riverside Church in the City of New York
  (New York University Press, 2004)
• "'My Story Begins Before I Was Born': Myth, History and Power in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust,"
  in S. Brent Plate, ed., Representing Religion in World Cinema: Mythmaking, Filmmaking, Culture Making
  (Palgrave, 2003)

Current Projects :

• Black Prophets, Gods, and Utopian Visions: Religion and Racial Identity in the Great Migration
• “’The Secret at the Root’: Performing African American Religious Modernity in Hall Johnson’s Run, Little Chillun”
• Eva Jessye's Spirituals: African American Religion, Music, and Cultures in Motion, 1870-1940