Alexia Williams
Race, Ethnicity and Migration in the Americas; African American Literatures and Cultures; African American Religious History; Religion and Modernity
Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude, Spelman College (2012)
Ph. D. 2020 (American Studies/ African American Studies), Yale University
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Alexia Williams is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies and African American Studies. She earned her B.A. in English and Spanish at Spelman College. Her research interests focus on questions of race, religion and aesthetic production in the hemispheric Americas. In her dissertation, “Black Revolutionary Saints: Roman Catholicism and the U.S. Racial Imagination,” Alexia examines black discursive and aesthetic practices of sainthood to understand how Roman Catholicism has operated as a site of racial identity formation, political organizing and aesthetic production for black Americans. Her research has been generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Louisville Institute for the Study of American Religion, the MacMillan Center, and the Xavier University of Louisiana Institute for Black Catholic Studies. In 2019-2020, Alexia will be a Visiting Scholar in the Religious Studies Department at Duke University.