Wallace D. Best

Address:
Harvard Divinity School
Divinity Hall 306
Cambridge, MA 02138

Phone: 617.384-7287
Fax:      617.496-0585
Email: wbest@hds.harvard.edu

Courses   |   Biography 

Courses

African and African American Studies 194y. Langston's Salvation: Race, Religion, and the Harlem Renaissance (New Course)

[African and African American Studies 194. African-American Religious History]

African and African American Studies 195y. Black Gospel Music: A History (New Course)

African and African American Studies 195. The American Sermon: Homiletics in the Mainstream and on the Margins (New Course)

[Religion 1580. Introduction to African American Religious History]

[Religion 1581. Black Women and Religious Narrative]

Religion 1582. Langston's Salvation: Race, Religion, and the Harlem Renaissance

Religion 1583. Black Gospel Music: A History

Religion 1591. Pentecostalism as a Global Religion (New Course)

Biography

Working within the fields of American and African American religious studies, Professor Best focuses his research and writing on the relationship between migration, urbanization, and religious transformation. His teaching has centered on the way social, cultural, and demographic shifts influence religious experience and practice. His latest work deals with gender and religion, the religious literature of the Harlem Renaissance, and global Pentecostalism, and seeks to place African American Pentecostalism within the context of the Pentecostal movement worldwide. Wallace Best came to Harvard Divinity School in 2004 after spending the 2003-2004 academic year as a fellow at Harvard's W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and a fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. He is the author of Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 (Princeton University Press, 2005). He has also worked on a number of public history projects, including two PBS documentaries, This Far by Faith and Soldiers Without Swords: The Black Press. Currently, he is working on a book of primary sources on the life of Elder Smith.