Juan M. Floyd-Thomas
Associate Professor of Black Church Studies

B.A., Rutgers University (1993)
M.A., Temple University (1996)
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania (2000)

Email: j.floyd-thomas@vanderbilt.edu

Curriculum Vitae

His research interests include: religious pluralism within modern American society; race, ethnicity, and religion in US history; and interdisciplinary approaches to the academic study of religious thought, especially cultural, political, economic, and social scientific theories and methods for analyzing the African American Christian experience. In his teaching and research, Prof. Floyd-Thomas emphasizes issues such as media interpretations and cultural images of African American religion, the varieties of African American religious experience, African American churches and sociopolitical reform, as well as the intersections of popular culture and American Christianity in the twentieth century. He has taught in the History departments at both Virginia Tech and Texas Christian University respectively.

In addition to several articles and book chapters regarding the African American religious experience, Prof. Floyd-Thomas is author of The Origins of Black Humanism: Reverend Ethelred Brown and the Unitarian Church (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and co-author of Black Church Studies: An Introduction (Abingdon Press, 2007). He is currently working on four major research projects: A City Called Heaven: A History of African American Religion in Harlem; Blessed Assurance: A Narrative History of the Black Church in America; The Altars Where We Worship: The Religious Significance of American Popular Culture (to be co-authored with Stacey Floyd-Thomas and Mark Toulouse); and Making It Plain: Approaches in African American Religious History (to be-coauthored with A.G. Miller). Also, he is a co-editor of the "Making It Plain: Approaches in Black Church Studies" series (Abingdon Press).

Prof. Floyd-Thomas is also a co-founder and executive board member of the Black Religious Scholars Group (BRSG) and currently serves on the cultural resources team of The African American Lectionary.