Jacob K. Olupona
Jacob K. Olupona is Professor of African Religious Traditions and Chair of the Committee on African studies at the Harvard Divinity School with a joint appointment as Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.
Biography
Jacob K. Olupona is a scholar of indigenous African religions who came to Harvard after serving as a professor at the University of California, Davis.
He is working on a study of the religious practices of the estimated one million Africans who have emigrated to the United States over the last 40 years, examining in particular several populations that remain relatively invisible in the American religious landscape: "reverse missionaries" who have come to the U.S. to establish churches, African Pentecostals in American congregations, American branches of independent African churches, and indigenous African religious communities in the U.S. His earlier research includes African spirituality and ritual practices, spirit possession, Pentecostalism, Yoruba festivals, animal symbolism, icons, phenomenology, and religious pluralism in Africa and the Americas.
In his forthcoming book Ile-Ife: The City of 201 Gods, he examines the modern urban mixing of ritual, royalty, gender, class, and power, and how the structure, content, and meaning of religious beliefs and practices permeate daily life.
He has authored or edited seven other books, including Kingship, Religion and Rituals in a Nigerian Community: A Phenomenological Study of Ondo Yoruba Festivals, which has beern used for ethnographic research among Yoruba-speaking communities.
Olupona has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Ford Foundation, the Davis Humanities Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Getty Foundation. He has served on the editorial boards of three journals and as president of the African Association for the Study of Religion. In 2000, Olupona received an honorary doctorate in divinity from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Jacob K. Olupona received his BA from the University of Nigeria and his MA and PhD from Boston University.
Works
- African Immigrant Religions in America (New York University 2007)
- Orisa Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yoruba Religious Culture (University of Wisconsin Press 2007)
- Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity (Routledge, 2004)
- Experiences of Place (Religions of the World) (Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions 2003)
- African Spirituality: Forms, Meanings and Expressions (Herder & Herder, 2001)
- Religious Plurality in Africa: Essays in Honour of John S. Mbiti (Mouton de Gruyter, 1993)
- Religion and Peace in Multi-faith Nigeria (African Books Collective Ltd, 1992)
- Kingship, Religion and Rituals in a Nigerian Community (Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1991)
- African Traditional Religions in Contemporary Society (Paragon House, 1991)
- City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifè in Time, Space, and the Imagination (University of California Press 2011)
Articles by Jacob K. Olupona
- “Osun across the Waters: A Yoruba goddess in Africa and the Americas.” African Affairs 104.416 (2005): 548-550.
- Foreword to Women in the Yoruba Religious Sphere. Ed. Oyeronke Olajubu. State University of New York Press, 2003.
- Review of “Odun Ifa: Ifa Festival” and “Insight and Artistry in African Divination.” Research in African Literatures 34.2 (2003): 225-229.
- “Review of ‘Religious Encounter and the Making of Yoruba.’” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 36.1 (2003): 182-186.
- “Women’s Rituals, Kingship and Power among the Ondo-Yoruba of Nigeria.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 810 (1997): 315-336.
- “Report of the Conference ‘Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity.’” Numen 44.3 (1997): 323-345.
- “The Study of Yoruba Religious Tradition in Historical Perspective.” Numen 40.3 (1993): 240-273.