About

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University and an affiliate of the department of African and African American Studies and the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is a historian specializing in Africana religion in the United States, with a focus on the religions of enslaved people, religion in the African Atlantic, and woman-gendered people's religious histories. Her first book, The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South, published by UNC Press in 2021, offers a gendered history of enslaved people's religiosity from the colonial period to the Civil War. The book has received multiple awards, including the 2022 prize for the Best First Book in the History of Religions from the American Academy of Religion, the 2022 Outstanding First Book Prize, and the 2022 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora. Her work has been supported by several prestigious foundations, including the American Council of Learned Societies, Ford Foundation, Forum for Theological Education, and Mellon Foundation. Currently, she is working on her second monograph titled American Fetish: Witchcraft and the Invention of Black Women in the Era of Slavery, along with two edited collections. In addition to her research, she serves on the advisory board of various journals, digital history projects, and museums, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History’s Commission of Religious Practitioners and Scholars and the National Museum of American Religion. She holds a B.A. in English from Spelman College, and both a Master of Divinity and a Ph.D. from Emory University.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Gender studies
• Philosophy
• History
• Archaeology
• Literature
• Art
• Geography
• Criminology
• Religious studies
• Epistemology
• Ethnology
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia

  Journal of American History · 2024 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Criminology

  Journal Article The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia Get access The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia. By Tamika Y Nunley. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. xiv, 243 pp. Cloth, $99.00. Paper, $27.95.) Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh Stanford University, Stanford, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 1, June 2024, Pages 151–152, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae031 Published: 01 June 2024

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• Sylvia Chan-Malik, Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam

  American Religion · 2022-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South. By Elizabeth L. Jemison. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 242 pp. $95 hardcover. $29.95 paperback.

  Church History · 2022-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South. By Elizabeth L. Jemison. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 242 pp. 29.95 paperback. - Volume 91 Issue 1

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• Decolonial Magic: Africana Religions in America and the Work of Ronald Hutton

  Magic, ritual, and witchcraft · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Decolonial Magic:Africana Religions in America and the Work of Ronald Hutton Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh Keywords Ronald Hutton, Paganism, witchcraft, decoloniality, Salem, African spirituality, Africana religions, Christianities, heathen, fetishism Given the intellectual silos that tend to govern the interlocutors with whom scholars choose to engage in their scholarship, Ronald Hutton's vast body of work on religion, particularly pagan religions, in the British Isles would likely not be an obvious source for knowledge about African-descended people in the United States. Persistent questions about historical colonialism and the decolonization of knowledge among those who study historically and presently marginalized subjects frequently precludes sustained intellectual engagement with the histories of the perceived colonizers. And the occupants of the British Isles were, of course, foremost among colonizing powers in the modern era. Categories intrinsic to the study of religion in pre- and early modern Britain, such as "witchcraft" and "paganism," provided the religious vocabularies through which the British and other Western Europeans invalidated Indigenous, African, and African-American cultures in service to their colonial ambitions in the Americas. Redeploying these dichotomies in discursive and legal spaces, European colonists and their American descendants contoured the boundaries of Whiteness and demarcated "religion" in the modern era in accordance with White and Christian supremacist hierarchies—obfuscating the practices and cosmologies of non-White peoples in the process.1 For this reason, few scholars of Africana religions [End Page 13] regard the histories of witchcraft, paganism, or religion in the British Isles as pertinent to the study of religion among captive and free African-descended people in the Americas beyond their violent, colonial legacies.2 Moreover, the intellectual apparatuses of religious studies—specifically modes of categorization, ways of defining boundaries, and processes of knowledge production—have not only authorized historical violence, but also enforced a type of intellectual colonialism that shapes how the religious cultures of marginalized subjects are translated into knowledge about religion in academic discourses. Certain religious subjects and manifestations of religiosity have been more legible than others, and this legibility often corresponds to the subjects' proximity to the center from whence "history" supposedly emanates. As a historian documenting the religious cultures of bondspeople in the United States, I am acutely aware of how encounters and conflicts across space and time continue to shape the archives and methodological approaches to the writing of religious history. The enslaved women that I study are perhaps among the most far removed from the center both in their historical contexts and in their historiographical presences. As non-White, largely non-Christian persons heavily circumscribed in their movement and speech, their archival presences are scant at best. And it is the dearth of archival evidence of their religiosity that has authorized their omission from the historiography of the Atlantic world as distinct religious actors. In this way, enslaved women's histories and those of historical paganisms boast unlikely, overlapping intellectual and methodological trajectories, despite their violent colonial intersections. As Hutton's careful scholarly voice conveys throughout his vast body of work, the religious histories of early and premodern Europeans are far from the tidy, primarily Christian teleology deployed in the modern era to support claims of cultural superiority. Rather, similar to the histories of enslaved women in the Anglophone North American colonies, pre- and early modern pagan histories of the British Isles are characterized at times by scant evidence, religious [End Page 14] polysemy, an imperfect assimilation of ideas and peoples, and concurrent and overlapping processes of cultural change. Moving beyond the mythic, historiographical arc of Christian triumphalism, Hutton's work demonstrates the parallels between pre- and early modern European peoples and those they later enslaved, colonized, and vilified, while offering insight into the cultural collision course between Africans and Europeans in the wider Atlantic. More significantly for broader conversations in religious studies, his methodological capaciousness attests to the possibilities for decolonial discourses when scholars contextualize the knowledge and challenge methods that reify intellectual silos. Hutton's work on pagan religions in the British Isles and witchcraft provides a critical window into the cultural politics that undergirded Western Europeans' claims to racial and cultural superiority over non-European peoples, as well as the critical flaws in these claims in...

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• Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher's Climb to Freedom by Larry Eugene Rivers

  The Journal of Southern History · 2022-07-24

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher's Climb to Freedom by Larry Eugene Rivers Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher's Climb to Freedom. By Larry Eugene Rivers. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 311. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-4030-9.) Despite the prominence of Afro-Protestantism in the historiography of Black religion in the United States, few studies devote more than a chapter to the lives of individual enslaved and freed Christians, on account of the scarce and disparate nature of sources by and about them. In Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher's Climb to Freedom, Larry Eugene Rivers uses James Page's rare autobiographical account and a range of supporting sources to offer a full-length biography of the preacher, starting with his enslavement and extending through the postemancipation era. Described by Rivers as "a committed father and husband, a teacher, a sexist, a segregationist, a moralist, a pluralist, a pragmatist, an overseer/manager, and a conservative political leader," Page led a life that typified the lives of other late-nineteenth-century enslaved and freedpeople in its precariousness, yet it evinced uncommon privilege on account of his literacy and relationship with slaveholders (p. 232). Through his narration of Page's extraordinary life, Rivers offers an in-depth look into how slavery's rigors shaped Christianity among the enslaved and at the proliferation of Afro-Protestantism in the wake of emancipation. Following the arc of Page's autobiography, Rivers traces the preacher's life in slavery from his birth in Richmond, Virginia, in 1808 through the Civil War—in the process revealing as much about the lives of bondpeople held by slaveholder John Parkhill as about Page's emergence as a spiritual leader. Throughout the biography, Rivers strives to paint a sensitive yet accurate portrait of Page as a young man striving to carve out a space in the world amid the uncertainties and negotiations endemic to life in slavery. Despite Page's atypical privileges, many familiar historical experiences and events are threaded throughout the narrative. Born to an enslaved woman and a free man, Page apparently remembered little of his parents, despite spending much of his early years with his mother, Susie Page, and younger brother, Tom. Rivers depicts Page's life as being heavily shaped by his slaveholder John Parkhill, whose conversion to Christianity, marriages, investment failures, economic growth, and death determined Page's literacy, separation from his mother and brother, movement from Virginia to Florida, elevation to the role of overseer, and ordination. Attending to Page's words, while filling in what might have been left unsaid, Rivers narrates Page's growth as a Baptist preacher in slavery and as a reluctant political leader afterward. Page's role as overseer on Parkhill's Florida plantation coincided with his ascension as a spiritual leader, and Rivers appropriately questions whether fear, as opposed to devotion, compelled Page's flock. According to Rivers, Page developed a Trinitarian, spiritually egalitarian, otherworldly theological stance that reflected his careful negotiation of his position within enslaved and slaveholding, Black and white societies. Rivers unabashedly brands the preacher a conservative both in terms of his adherence to patriarchal gender norms and in his continued economic and political partnerships with former slaveholders after freedom. Juxtaposing [End Page 552] Page with his more progressive African Methodist Episcopal Church counterparts, Rivers presents the varied ways Black Protestant leaders responded to freedom in the South and offers insight into how denominational affiliations aligned with sociopolitical stances. Page's extraordinary sociopolitical career as the founder of Bethel Baptist Sunday School, a registrar, and a justice of the peace in Leon County, Florida, cautions against one-dimensional portraits of historical figures and the all-encompassing projections of terms like conservative and progressive. In the end, Page was a complex individual whose measured political activities were a part of a larger landscape of Black people striving toward economic and political freedom, even as his relationships with former slaveholders enabled him to plant Baptist churches throughout the South. Besides adding to a corpus of knowledge regarding Afro-Protestantism, Rivers models the methodological creativity necessary for excavating details about the lives of people...

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• Denmark Vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial. By Jeremy Schipper

  Journal of the American Academy of Religion · 2022-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article Denmark Vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial. By Jeremy Schipper Get access Denmark Vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial By Jeremy Schipper Princeton University Press, 2022. 181 pages. $26.95 (hardcover). Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh Stanford University aswells@stanford.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, lfad022, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfad022 Published: 14 June 2023

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• Engendering<i>Slave Religion</i>: Methodology Beyond the Invisible Institution

  Journal of the American Academy of Religion · 2022-09-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article argues for a deprioritization of religious tradition in favor of practice-centered approaches to the study of religion among enslaved people in the United States as a means of rendering the African Atlantic and gendered dimensions more legible. In the wake of W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous argument for “the preacher, the music, and the frenzy” as the constitutive elements of African American religiosity in slavery, the historiography of slave religion has largely revolved around institutional manifestations of religion and the figures who powered them. To this end, religious traditions rooted in institutional models—with centralized authority figures, defined rites, and performative parameters—often serve as indices of religion among the enslaved. Surveying the historiography of slave religion, this article explores how the methodological prioritization of religious traditions has left the religious histories of women and others who resided outside of androcentric, heteronormative institutional frameworks largely hidden in the metanarrative of US religion and slavery. Methodologies aimed at the study of practices apart from institutions, however, prove generative for the recovery of woman-gendered and African Atlantic religious histories in the US South.

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• Georgia Genesis

  University of North Carolina Press eBooks · 2021-09-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Chapter one surveys the material conditions of enslavement that are critical to apprehending the religious consciousness and cultures of enslaved, African-descended women in the Lower South. Through an examination of the ontological meanings of enslavement, the resignification of the womb, work cultures, and structures of violence the chapter explores the material and psychic conditions that shaped enslaved women’s and other enslaved people’s experiences of dismemberment from West Africa to North America. Moreover, by highlighting the gendered nature of West African slavery prior to the transatlantic slave trade, the chapter argues that gender and race are equally salient vectors in the “genesis” of African American religious consciousness and cultures in the enslaved South.

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• Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon

  Mormon Studies Review · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Book Review| January 01 2021 Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon Quincy D. Newell. Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh Reviewed by Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. A historian of African American religion, her research and teaching foci include religion and American slavery, race and religion in the US, and women’s religious histories. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Mormon Studies Review (2021) 8: 133–136. https://doi.org/10.5406/mormstudrevi.8.2021.0133 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh; Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon. Mormon Studies Review 1 January 2021; 8 133–136. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/mormstudrevi.8.2021.0133 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressMormon Studies Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2021 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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• Dedication

  University of North Carolina Press eBooks · 2021-09-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Awards & honors

• 2022 prize for the Best First Book in the History of Religio…
• 2022 Outstanding First Book Prize from the Association for t…
• 2022 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Book Prize from the Association fo…
• Finalist for the 2022 Frederick Douglass Book Prize awarded…