The MA in Religion & Public Life in the College of the Humanities is proud to present the first lecture in the 2022 Annual Edgar and Dorothy Davidson Lecture Series: “You're Studying Us, But Who's Studying You? The Imperative and Perils of Decolonizing Religious Studies.”
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike is Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia, specializing in the intellectual and aesthetic dimensions of West African Sufism and Yoruba oriṣa traditions.
Dr. Ogunnaike received his PhD in African and African American studies and Religion from Harvard University and his A.B. in African Studies and Cognitive Neuroscience from Harvard College.
He is the author of Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: A Study of West African Madīḥ Poetry and its Precedents (Islamic Texts Society, 2020) and Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (Penn State University Press, 2020).