Jacob K. Olupona is the Professor of African Religious Traditions and Chair of the Committee on African studies at the Harvard Divinity School with a joint appointment as Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Harvard Divinity School is one of the constituent schools of Harvard University, located in Cambridge Massachusetts, in the United States.
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Biography
Jacob K. Olupona is a noted scholar of indigenous African religions who came to Harvard after serving as a professor at the University of California, Davis. The University of California Davis, commonly known as UC Davis, or just UCD, is a public coeducational university located in the city of Davis,
He is currently working on a path breaking study of the religious practices of the estimated one million Africans who have emigrated to the United States over the last 40 years, examining in particular several populations that remain relatively invisible in the American religious landscape: "reverse missionaries" who have come to the U. The term African people can refer to people who live in Africa, or people who trace their ancestry to Indigenous inhabitants of Africa. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the S. to establish churches, African Pentecostals in American congregations, American branches of independent African churches, and indigenous African religious communities in the U. Pentecostalism is a renewalist religious movement within Christianity that places special emphasis on the direct personal experience of God through the Baptism S. His earlier research ranged across African spirituality and ritual practices, spirit possession, Pentecostalism, Yoruba festivals, animal symbolism, icons, phenomenology, and religious pluralism in Africa and the Americas. Spirituality, in a narrow sense concerns itself with matters of the Spirit, a concept closely tied to religious belief and Faith, a transcendent reality Spirit possession is a concept of Paranormal, Supernatural and/or Superstitious belief in which spirits, gods, daemons Pentecostalism is a renewalist religious movement within Christianity that places special emphasis on the direct personal experience of God through the Baptism Religious pluralism (rel Comparative religion) is a loosely defined expression concerning acceptance of different Religions and is used in a number of related The Americas are the lands of the Western hemisphere or New World, consisting of the Continents of North America and South America In his forthcoming book Ile-Ife: The City of 201 Gods, he examines the modern urban mixing of ritual, royalty, gender, class, and power, and how the structure, content, and meaning of religious beliefs and practices permeate daily life. Gender comprises a range of differences between men and women extending from the biological to the social
He has authored or edited seven other books, including Kingship, Religion and Rituals in a Nigerian Community: A Phenomenological Study of Ondo Yoruba Festivals, which has become a model for ethnographic research among Yoruba-speaking communities.
Olupona has received prestigious grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Ford Foundation, the Davis Humanities Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Getty Foundation. The American Philosophical Society is a discussion group founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin as an offshoot of his earlier club the Junto. The Ford Foundation is a Private foundation incorporated in Michigan and based in New York City created to fund programs that were chartered in 1936 by The Rockefeller Foundation (RF is a prominent Philanthropic organization and Private foundation based at 420 Fifth Avenue New York City. The Getty Foundation, based in Los Angeles California, at the Getty Center, awards grants for "the understanding and preservation of the visual arts" He has served on the editorial boards of three influential journals and as president of the African Association for the Study of Religion. In 2000, Olupona received an honorary doctorate in divinity from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The University of Edinburgh (Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann founded in 1582 is a renowned centre for teaching and research in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. Scotland ( Gaelic: Alba) is a Country in northwest Europethat occupies the northern third of the island of Great Britain.
Jacob K. Olupona received his BA from the University of Nigeria and his MA and PhD from Boston University. The University of Nigeria is in Nsukka town of Enugu State of Nigeria For similarly-named academic institutions see Education in Boston MA.
Works
- African Immigrant Religions in America (New York University 2007)
- Orisa Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yoruba Religious Culture (University of Wisconsin 2007)
- Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity (Routledge, 2004)
- Experiences of Place (Religions of the World) (Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions 2003)
- African Spirituality: Forms, Meanings and Expressions (Herder & Herder, 2001)
- Religious Plurality in Africa: Essays in Honour of John S. Mbiti (Mouton de Gruyter, 1993)
- Religion and Peace in Multi-faith Nigeria (African Books Collective Ltd, 1992)
- Kingship, Religion and Rituals in a Nigerian Community (Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1991)
- African Traditional Religions in Contemporary Society (Paragon House, 1991)
Articles by Jacob K. Olupona
- “Osun across the Waters: A Yoruba goddess in Africa and the Americas. ” African Affairs 104. 416 (2005): 548-550.
- Foreword to Women in the Yoruba Religious Sphere. Ed. Oyeronke Olajubu. State University of New York Press, 2003.
- Review of “Odun Ifa: Ifa Festival” and “Insight and Artistry in African Divination. ” Research in African Literatures 34. 2 (2003): 225-229.
- “Review of ‘Religious Encounter and the Making of Yoruba. ’” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 36. 1 (2003): 182-186.
- “Women’s Rituals, Kingship and Power among the Ondo-Yoruba of Nigeria. ” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 810 (1997): 315-336.
- “Report of the Conference ‘Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity. ’” Numen 44. 3 (1997): 323-345.
- “The Study of Yoruba Religious Tradition in Historical Perspective. ” Numen 40. 3 (1993): 240-273.