Africana Studies professor Vaughn Booker was named the George E. Doty, Jr. and Lee Spelman Doty Presidential Associate Professor of Africana Studies on Oct. 29.
The award, which was established by Wharton 1976 graduates Lee Spelman Doty and George E. Doty Jr. in 2021, recognizes Booker’s contributions to the field of African American religions. Booker’s research focuses on individuals who create or reshape religious and racial identities, communities, and systems of authority.
Booker has won several awards for his book “Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century.” His academic publications have appeared in “The Journal of Africana Religions, Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation,” and “Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions.” He is a co-chair of the Afro-American Religious History Unit of the American Academy of Religion and a distinguished junior external faculty fellow of the Stanford University Humanities Center.
When Booker arrived to Penn, he told Penn Today that the African Studies department has a “very strong history of towering scholars.”
“It’s important that graduate students in African American history know that it doesn’t make sense for Black religions and spirituality to be absent from their undergraduate syllabi in African American history or Black studies,” Booker said at the time. “If we’re thinking comprehensively about Black life, that has to be important to the conversation.”
Booker's teaching often intersects several fields, involving topics such as Black religion and culture during the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights movement, and contemporary Black memoirs.
This fall, Booker is teaching a first year seminar on Black spiritual memoirs. The memoirs discuss different personal journeys of Black people, from Black Buddhist and Humanist orientations to Black radical Christians and Yoruba priestesses.
“It’s a way to look at Black religious and spiritual diversity through people who write about their own lives,” Booker told Penn Today.
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