Dianne M. Stewart
Emory University
Dianne Marie Stewart is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University, specializing in African heritage religious cultures in the Caribbean and the Americas and womanist approaches to religion and society. She was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. She obtained her B.A. degree from Colgate University in English and African American Studies, her M.Div. degree from Harvard Divinity School, and her Ph.D. degree in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. She joined Emory’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and teaches courses in the graduate and undergraduate programs. Dr. Stewart is the author and editor of four books and numerous articles and chapters, including Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (Oxford University Press, 2005), Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II, Orisa: Africana Nations and the Power of Black Sacred Imagination (Duke University Press, 2022), and Black Women, Black Love: America’s War on African American Marriage (Seal Press in 2020).
Dr. Stewart’s research has been supported by prestigious national and international fellowships. In 2025, the John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation named her a Fellow among its 100th class. Previously, she was a Fulbright Scholar, a Senior Fellow at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and an Emory College of Arts and Sciences Chronos Faculty Fellow. A celebrated classroom teacher and mentor, Dr. Stewart also holds the Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award, Emory College of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Advising Award, Emory University Laney Graduate School’s Eleanor Main Graduate Faculty Mentor Award, and the Laney Graduate School’s Faculty Award for Inclusive Excellence in the Humanities. She is an executive board member of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora and has served on several program units within the American Academy of Religion. She is also a founding co-editor, with Drs. Jacob Olupona and Terrence Johnson, of the Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People series at Duke University Press.
Talk Information:
Yorùbá-Òrìṣà Spiritual Legacies and the Quest for Religious Freedom in Trinidad
September 4, 2026 | 9:00 AM
Despite the measures colonizing regimes took to repress African religiosity in the Americas and the Caribbean, the West African Yorùbá-Òrìṣà spiritual heritage has left an indelible imprint upon the religious cultures of African descendants. Although studies of such spiritual legacies in the diaspora emphasize Brazil and Cuba, custodians of Yorùbá-Òrìṣà religion in Trinidad have experienced unparalleled success in their struggles to overcome colonial legacies of religious repression. This lecture examines their quest for religious autonomy in the 19th and 20th centuries through an Africana Religious Studies framework that (1) offers a culturally attentive historical contextualization of Trinidad’s Yorùbá-Òrìṣà tradition and (2) contributes to theories of Black religion by analyzing how devotees remember, conceptualize, and deploy Africa as a spiritually and politically mobilizing symbol.