About

Dr. Joy R. Bostic, is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the founding director of the minor in Africana Studies. She is a program faculty member of the Women’s and Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies programs. Bostic is also a Co-Pi for the Humanities in Learning Leadership Series funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and serves as a member of the steering committee for the Mysticism Unit of the American Academy of Religion. She has written several book chapters and scholarly articles on race, gender and religion and is the author of African American Female Mysticism: Nineteenth-Century Religious Activism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Bostic’s forthcoming book, Performing God-Talk: Religion, Ritual and Resistance in African American Popular Culture (Routledge, 2023), explores religion, ritual and race in music and performance. She is a member of the Transatlantic Roundtable on Religion and Race (TRRR) and is a co-editor of TRRR’s volume Black Religious Landscaping in Africa and the United States (Peter Lang, 2021).

Professor Bostic earned a Juris Doctor and Master of Arts in public policy and management from The Ohio State University. She also attended Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary where she was awarded the Master of Divinity degree. After graduating from seminary, she was ordained a Christian minister at Second Baptist Church in Evanston, Illinois. While attending Garrett-Evangelical, she worked as a research assistant for the Religion in Urban America Project, an ethnographic study based at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Reverend Bostic received her Ph.D. in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York. An artist at heart, Professor Bostic enjoys dance and textile arts.

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