Vaughn A. Booker Named George E. Doty, Jr. and Lee Spelman Doty Presidential Associate Professor of Africana Studies

Vaughn A. Booker has been named the George E. Doty, Jr. and Lee Spelman Doty Presidential Associate Professor of Africana Studies. Booker is a historian of religion whose scholarship and teaching center on 20th-century African American religions.

He focuses on people who engage in practices of (re)making simultaneously religious and racial identities, communities, and forms of authority. His teaching interests, which incorporate intersectional approaches, include Black religion and culture during Jim Crow, religion and the Civil Rights movement, contemporary Black religious/spiritual memoirs, religion and mourning/memorialization, and modern Black religious/spiritual communities.

Booker’s first book, Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century, won the Council of Graduate Schools’ 2022 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities and was a finalist for the American Academy of Religion’s 2021 Religion and the Arts Book Award. His other academic publications have appeared in The Journal of Africana Religions, Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, and Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions. Booker co-chairs the Afro-American Religious History Unit of the American Academy of Religion. In 2022-2023, he was a Distinguished Junior External Faculty Fellow with the Stanford University Humanities Center and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. He was selected as one of 10 junior religion faculty nationwide to be in the 2019-2020 cohort of the Young Scholars in American Religion Program.
 
Lee Spelman Doty, W’76, and George E. Doty, Jr., W’76, established the George E. Doty, Jr., and Lee Spelman Doty Presidential Professorship in 2021. Lee is an Emeritus University Trustee and member of the Trustees’ Council of Penn Women. She previously served as Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees and President of the Penn Alumni Association. In 2022, Lee received the Alumni Award of Merit, one of Penn’s highest honors. She is currently Vice Chair of Global Equities at JP Morgan Asset Management. George has served for many years in leadership roles for his class reunion committee. In addition to the endowed professorship, they have generously supported key initiatives across campus over the years, including undergraduate scholarships, graduate student support, and the Presidential Engagement Prize.