Story and photo courtesy of Harvard Divinity School
Tracey Hucks ’87, MA’90, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana religious studies at Harvard Divinity School, Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and former Colgate University provost, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest and most esteemed honorary societies.
She is one of 252 newly elected members this year, drawn from across higher education, the arts, public policy, and the sciences. Established in 1780, the Academy honors individuals for outstanding achievement and brings members together to engage critical issues facing society.
According to Hucks, the award letter from the Academy arrived upon her return from the Fifth United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent in Geneva, Switzerland.
“The timing of this unexpected honor was for me more than just an individual distinction, but a recognition of centuries of African-descended communities whose lives I seek to bring integrity and visibility to in the field of Africana religious studies,” Hucks said. “I stand in gratitude to many who have come before me, and I am honored to enter this eminent Academy, where the excellence of my own Harvard teachers and mentors such as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, David D. Hall, and Jacob K. Olupona have blazed a path as distinguished members.”
A nationally recognized scholar of Africana religious studies and American religious history, Hucks examines the religious cultures of the African diaspora and their influence on identity, resistance, and intellectual life across the Atlantic world. Her research spans the Caribbean, West Africa, and the United States, drawing on historical, literary, and ethnographic sources to illuminate the complexity and enduring significance of Africana religious traditions.
Hucks is the author of Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism, a finalist for the American Academy of Religion First Book Award in 2012, and the recent Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad: Volume One: Africans in the White Colonial Imagination, part of a two-volume study co-authored with Dianne Stewart ’90 that examines the role of Africana religious cultures in shaping diaspora identities.