Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and affiliate of the department of African and African American Studies and Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University. A historian of Africana religion in the United States, she specializes in the religions of enslaved people in the United States, religion in the African Atlantic, and woman-gendered people’s religious histories. 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 2022 Outstanding First Book Prize and 2022 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, Forum for Theological Education, and Mellon Foundation, 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 and two edited collections. In addition to her research activities, Wells-Oghoghomeh sits on the advisory board of several journals, digital history projects, 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. She received her B.A. in English from Spelman College, and Master of Divinity and Ph.D. from Emory University.