Ras Michael Lawrence Brown
Georgia State Unnversity
Professor – History
Ras Michael Brown’s research and teaching interests engage the long historical development of religions and cultures in the African Diaspora with special emphasis on the dispersal of Kongo/Bantu people and cultures throughout the Atlantic World. Early African/American communities and their spiritual cultures figure prominently within this larger scope, especially those in South Carolina and Georgia that were ancestral to Gullah-Geechee communities. Dr. Brown’s book African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry (Cambridge University Press, 2012) was honored by the Journal of Africana Religions as the inaugural recipient of the “Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions” in 2013. Other publications include “Gullah and Ebo: Reconsidering Early Lowcountry African American Communities,” “The Immersion of Catholic Christianity in Kalunga,” and “Mother Nganga: Women Experts in the Bantu-Atlantic Spiritual Cultures of the Iberian Atlantic World.” Additionally, essays on Black hunters in early South Carolina, African religions in early North America, and indigenous identities in Africana religions are in various stages of revision and production now.