Stephen C. Finley

Raised in Santa Ana, California, Stephen C. Finley (MA/PhD, Rice University, 2006/2009; MDiv, Virginia Union University; B.A. Pepperdine University) is the Inaugural Chair of the Department of African & African American Studies at Louisiana State University and Professor of African & African American Studies. He is the former Executive Director (2018-2021) of the Society for the Study of Black Religion. He is the co-editor (with Margarita Simon Guillory and Hugh R. Page, Jr) of Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: “There Is a Mystery”… (Brill 2015), which initiated Africana Esoteric Studies, a new area of scholarship with a robustly growing body of work. He is co-editor (with Biko Mandela Gray and Lori Latrice Martin) of The Religion of White Rage: White Workers, Religious Fervor, and the Myth of Black Racial Progress (Edinburgh University Press). His monograph, In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam is published with Duke University Press (2022). Two other books are under advance contract: One on Black Faculty Studies (coauthored with Biko Mandela Gray and Lori Latrice Martin, Johns Hopkins University Press); and the other on Robert T. Browne (Oxford University Press). His favorite color is purple. His favorite flowers (purple, of course) are lisianthus and delphinium. He has collections of fine crystal and African American art, and Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. is his fraternal affiliation.