Current Research

My current book project—Spiritual Baptist Mystique (forthcoming with Duke University Press, Spring 2027)—looks to trouble the taken for granted correspondences between religion, identity, and cosmology by exploring their disjunctures and novel articulations in the context of Spiritual Baptist Christianity, a quintessential if frequently misunderstood Afro-Caribbean religious tradition in Trinidad and Tobago. Compellingly, Spiritual Baptists challenge conventional scholarly treatments of Christian orthodoxy and Black Atlantic religiosity by reconciling a “fundamentalist” Christian identity with an especially fluid cosmopolitan eclecticism. These self-styled Christian originalists who regularly incorporate rituals gleaned from African, Hindu, Jewish, esoteric/occult, and other disparate sources, upend the normative analytic categories scholars rely on to parse and make sense of religious and cultural difference. Drawing on comprehensive long-term ethnographic research in Trinidad and Tobago, this book shows how the unique permutations of creole variation within the Spiritual Baptist faith unsettle deterministic equations of race and religion and contest the often manufactured oppositions between Christianity and Africanness. This book departs from well-worn analyses of Afro-Christian syncretism to develop original, empirically grounded ethnographic perspectives on Caribbean vernacular religious expression that fosters critical insight into the fascinating world of cosmopolitan spiritualities, multicultural ritual semiotics, ethnonational religious imaginaries, and the extraordinary (if still often overlooked) heterodox frontiers of Christian variation in the African diaspora.