Today’s conversation is with Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, who teaches in the Religious Studies department at Stanford University, where she is also an affiliate of the department of African and African American Studies and Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her first book The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (UNC Press, 2021) is a gendered history of enslaved people’s religiosity from the colonial period to the onset of the Civil War. It won the 2022 prize for the Best First Book in the History of Religions from the American Academy of Religion, as well as the Outstanding First Book Prize and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD). The book was also a finalist for the 2022 Frederick Douglass Book Prize awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History at Yale University and named a “Best Book of 2021” by Publisher’s Weekly. 

Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and Forum for Theological Education, among others. Dr. Wells-Oghoghomeh is currently at work on her second monograph tentatively titled American Fetish:Witchcraft and the Invention of Black Women in the Era of Slavery, an anthology of documents on religion and slavery, and an edited collection on African American religious history. A historian of Atlantic slavery and religion, she sits on the advisory board of a number of digital history projects, journals, and museums, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History’s Commission of Religious Practitioners and Scholars (CORPS) and the National Museum of American Religion.