Tracey E. Hucks

Tracey E. Hucks is a Suzanne Young Murray Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Her most recent book is Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume One, Obeah: Africans in the White Colonial Imagination (Duke University Press, 2022). Drawing on sources ranging from colonial records, laws, and legal transcripts to travel diaries, literary fiction, and written correspondence, Hucks documents the persecution and violent penalization of African religious practices encoded under the legal classification of “obeah.” 

During her Radcliffe fellowship year, Hucks will explore rare archival holdings on African American divinatory, healing, conjure, and theurgical practices. These materials from the 19th and 20th centuries lend important insight into Southern esoteric and curative arts of African Americans; vernacular practices and their challenge to the boundaries of traditional orthodoxy; and the importance of material culture and ritual paraphernalia in providing alternative indicators for deciphering religious meaning.

A graduate of Colgate University, she earned her AM and PhD from Harvard University. Hucks is also the author of Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism (University of New Mexico Press, 2012). She recently served as provost and dean of the faculty and the James A. Storing Professor of Religion and Africana and Latin American Studies at Colgate University. Hucks previously taught at Davidson College, as the James D. Vail III Professor and chair of the Africana Studies Department, and at Haverford College, where she is now a member of the Corporation.