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J. Lorand Matory
- Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director, Center for African and African American Research
- African & African American Studies
- 201C Friedl Building
- Campus Box 900091
- Phone: (919) 684-9923
- Fax: (919) 681-8483
- Office Hours: Tuesday & Wednesday - 2:00-3:00pm
- Curriculum Vitae
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Specialties
- Anthropology & History
- African Diaspora
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Research Summary
Anthropology of religion, of ethnicity, and of education; history and theory of anthropologyAfrican and African-inspired religions around the Atlantic perimeter; ethnic diversity in the African-descended population of the US; tertiary education as a culture; gender, religion and politics; transnationalism; spirit possession -
Research Description
J. Lorand Matory is Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies and Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University. He researches the trans-Atlantic comings and goings of Yoruba religion, which has shaped social order and traditions of worship and healing all over the Americas. He also studies ethnic diversity in the Black population of the United States.
With the support of the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, he has conducted extensive field research in Brazil, Nigeria, and the United States.
Choice magazine selected Dr. Matory’s Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion (Minnesota, 1994; Berghahn Press, 2005) as an Outstanding Book of the Year in 1994, and his Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton University Press, 2005) received the Melville J. Herskovits Prize for the best book of the year from the African Studies Association. He has also published over forty articles in various peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, newspapers, and magazines.
He is currently writing a book on the history and experience of Nigerians, Trinidadians, Ethiopians, African-descended Native Americans, Louisiana Creoles, Gullah/Geechees and other ethnic groups that make up the black population of the United States. It focuses on the transformative coexistence of these groups at the United States’ leading historically Black university—Howard University. In fall 2008, the results were delivered as the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures at the University of Rochester, anthropology’s most prestigious lecture series. They will be published by the University of Chicago Press under the title Of the Race but above the Race: Stigma and the Schooling of Ethnicity in the “Mecca” of Black Education.
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Current Projects
Of the Race but above the Race: Stigma and the Schooling of Ethnic Identity in the "Mecca" of Black Education -
Areas of Interest
spirit possession
African religions
African-diaspora religions
Afro-Atlantic religions
gender
transnationalism
African culture in the Americas
religion and politics -
Awards, Honors and Distinctions
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- Distinguished Africana Award,
- University of North Carolina, Charlotte,
- October, 2012
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- Distinguished Africanist Award,
- American Anthropological Association, Association for Africanist Anthropology,
- November, 2010
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- Thomas Langford Lectureship Award,
- Duke University,
- March, 2010
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- "Favorite Professors of the Harvard College Class of 2009.",
- Harvard Yearbook,
- May 2009
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- Outstanding Africana Service Award,
- African-New World Studies, Florida International University,
- March, 2008
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- Melville J. Herskovits Prize,
- African Studies Association,
- November, 2006
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- S. Allen Counter Award for Excellence in Faculty and Administration,
- Association of Black Harvard Women,
- April, 2006
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- Spencer Foundation Major Grant,
- Spencer Foundation, Chicago,
- January 2006
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- National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers for overseas archival research and writing on Afro-Brazilian religion and politics,
- 1995-1996
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- Social Science Research Council Grant for Field Research in Bahia and São Paulo, Brazil,
- February-September, 1992
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- W. E. B. Du Bois Fellowship for Afro-American Research for the support of field research and writing on Afro-Brazilian culture,
- January-December, 1992
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- Post-doctoral Research Fellowship in Anthropology, Princeton University,
- 1991
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- Charles Gaius Bolin Fellowship for teaching and dissertation write-up, Williams College,
- 1990
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- Fulbright-Hays (Dept. of Education) Fellowship for pre-dissertation research--Nigeria,
- 1988-1989
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- Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) International Studies Fellowship, Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, Brazil,
- August-December, 1987
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- CIC International Studies Fellowship, Nigeria,
- Summer 1986
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- Roy D. Albert Prize for Excellence in the Graduate Study of Anthropology, University of Chicago,
- 1986
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- National Science Foundation Fellowship for Graduate Study, University of Chicago,
- 1985-1989
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- CIC Graduate Fellowship for Minorities, University of Chicago,
- 1984-1985
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- Danforth-Compton Fellowship for Graduate Study,
- 1984-1991
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- Rotary Scholarship for Graduate Study Abroad, Nigeria,
- 1982-1983
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Recent Publications
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- (February, 2012).
- He Fit the Description: Prejudice and Pain in Progressive Communities.
- Racism in the Academy: The New Millenium
- Audrey Smedley and Janis Faye Hutchinson (Eds.),
- ,
- 138-44.
- American Anthropological Association.
- [web]
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- (2012).
- The Homeward Ship: Analytic Tropes as Maps of and for African-Diaspora Cultural History".
- In Rebecca Hardin and Kamari Maxine Clarke (Eds.),
- Transforming Ethnographic Knowledge
- Madison, WI:
- University of Wisconsin Press.
Publication Description
Over time, an identifiable but changing set of tropes has organized hypotheses and research in the study of the African diaspora. Those same tropes have consequently influenced the self-conceptions and social organization of African and African-diaspora communities, a fact that deserves recognition in the analytic tropes that researchers and writer employ.
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- (2012).
- "The 21st-Century 'Fetish': the Monarch and the Slave in the Black Atlantic Citizen.
- Material Religion
- .
Publication Description
The Afro-Atlantic religions dramatize the idea that the person is a vessel of multiple, largely exogenous beings, monarchs and slaves prominently among them. The sacred icons of Santeria/Ocha, Candomble, Haitian Vodou, Yoruba indigenous religion, Kongo indigenous religion,and the Western-style nation-state are employed to illustrate this principle, as well as the apparent irony that such religions have proliferated in the context of the modern republic and its neo-liberal transformations.
This article is in revision.
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- (2012).
- Culture and Stigma: Race, Ethnicity and Class in Black America.
- University of Chicago Press.
Publication Description
Culture and Stigma concerns personal experiences and the cultural self-fashioning of Louisiana Creoles of color, Indians of partly African ancestry, Gullah/Geechees, West Indians, and Africans at Howard University and in its alumni networks. The book explores the role of racism and other forms of stigma in the propagation of ethnic identities.
I completed the manuscript in November.
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- (June 2, 2009).
- What Harvard Has Taught Me.
- Harvard Crimson
- .
- [web]
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- View All Publications
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PhD Students
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Brian Smithson
- August, 2011 - present
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Kwame Z. Shabazz
- 2003
- Thesis: All Africans Are Not Negroes
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Megwen Loveless
- 2000 - present
- Thesis: Forro Music and Brazilian National Identity
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