Dear Colleague Faculty, Students, and Staff,
As was announced in yesterday’s Faculty Meeting, Provost and Dean of the Faculty Tracey Hucks will be taking a sabbatical during the 2021–22 academic year to complete several significant research projects in Africana Studies, Religious Studies, Caribbean Studies, diaspora theory, and transatlantic and transnational studies.
When Tracey first contemplated returning to Colgate from her endowed professorship at Davidson College, she and I spoke at length about the ways in which she could maintain her research program and how Colgate would support her continuing scholarly work. We long contemplated a sabbatical to allow for the completion of a number of significant research projects. The alignment of this sabbatical next year with that of her co-author and fellow Colgate alumna Dianne M. Stewart ’90 is especially fortuitous. A description of their project, as well as an overview of a second major project for Dean Hucks follows this announcement.
I am pleased to announce that, while on her research sabbatical, Tracey will continue to serve on the Chief Diversity Officer search and has agreed to participate in fundraising activities related to the academic initiatives under The Third-Century Plan.
During the 2021–22 academic year, Ellen Percy Kraly, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies, will serve as Interim Provost and Dean of the Faculty. At Colgate Ellen has served as Associate Dean of the Faculty, Divisional Director for both University Studies and Social Sciences, a department chair (Geography) and program chair (Environmental Studies), Director of the Upstate Institute, and a member of the Committee on Promotion and Tenure. She has also served on numerous Universitywide search committees and, this year, was as a member of the Task Force on Reopening the Campus. I am so grateful to Ellen for agreeing to serve Colgate in this way and look forward to our work together.
I wish Tracey good luck as she enters this important year and thank Ellen for her continued service to Colgate during what will be a deeply important year for our Core revision efforts and our continued work developing and implementing the initiatives developed under The Third-Century Plan.
Sincerely,
Brian W. Casey
President
Summary of Research Projects
Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad is a two-volume collaborative research project by Tracey E. Hucks ’87, MA ’90 (Africans in the White Colonial Imagination-Obeah, Volume 1) and Dianne M. Stewart ’90 (Africana Nations and the Power of Black Sacred Imagination-Orisa, Volume 2). Both volumes, contracted by Duke University Press with expected publication 2022, are a culmination of fifteen years of archival and ethnographic research conducted in Trinidad, England, France, Nigeria, and the United States.
In Volume 1, Dean Hucks explores issues of religion and juridical policy, scrutinizing nineteenth-century colonial legal cases against Africans accused of the crime of Obeah (deemed as sorcery). Obeah trials revealed the complex fears and social anxieties related to the presence of enslaved Africans in colonial Trinidad, the perceived risk Obeah posed to Christian domination, and Obeah’s reputed similarity to the bedlam of European occultism.
Volume Two by Dianne M. Stewart focuses primarily on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and explores the transplantation and repurposing of Yoruba-Orisa religious cultures in Trinidad within two conflicting orders: (1) the intimate universe that organized Yoruba people-groups into a unified nation, and (2) the long horizon of colonial obeah. Whereas Volume One contends with a paucity of primary sources that convey emic African understandings of the numinous during the early colonial period and throughout much of the nineteenth century, Volume Two analyzes a range of source material, including ethnographic, to provide an intellectual forum for African voices, their narrations of spiritual cohesion and dynamism, and their achievements in the struggle for religious freedom in Trinidad from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century.
A significant portion of Dean Hucks’ research sabbatical will also be devoted to completing the research and writing on a long-standing book project entitled, Africana Esotericism: Charms, Veils, and Divination in the Black Religious Underground. Africana Esotericism is an examination of the rare archival and material culture holdings on African American divinatory, folk healing, conjure, and theurgical practices at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript and Rare Book Library (MARBL) at Emory University. In examining these complex lived religious practices, this project seeks to give scholarly expression to African American religious vernacularism whereby public religious identities are negotiated and performed while simultaneously accommodating esoteric and clandestine folk practices.