Education

A.B. Duke University (1999)
M.D.I. Emory University, Theology (2002)
Ph.D. Emory University (2007)

Scholarship/Creative Work

Select Presentations

• “The ‘New’ Black Woman as Scripted by the Music of Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself,” MESEA Bi-Annual Conference, Barcelona, Spain (June, 2012)

• “The ‘Church of Oprah’ and the Rise of Sapphmammibel: Race-ing Fatness in Contemporary Culture” PCA/ACA annual meeting, Boston, MA (April, 2012)

• “Mediated Experience: George Shulman’s American Prophecy and the 'Problem' of Location, Caribbean Philosophical Association annual meeting, Rutgers University, (October 2011)

• “Funny Black Men, Fat Black Women: Masculinizing the Feminine in Popular Film,” Black History Month Faculty Lecture Series, Rhode Island College (February 2011)

Select Publications

• Book Review: The SAGE Handbook of African American Education. Edited by Linda C. Tillman.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2009. Teaching Theology and Religion Vol. 13, Issue 3 (July 2010), 297-299.

• Book: Research Contributor: The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman. Vol. 1: My People Need Me, June 1918-March 1936. Walter Earl Fluker, Senior Editor. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2009.

• Article: “Color-Blind America?” Religion Dispatches. November 19, 2008 Available: http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/election08/748/

Awards, Fellowships & Grants

Select Awards, Fellowships, and Grants

• Career Enhancement Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (2010-2011)
• Summer Fellowship, Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning (2010)                      
• Postdoctoral Diversity Fellowship, Ford Foundation (2009-2010)                           
• First Book Grant for Minority Scholars, The Louisville Institute (2009-2010)                                         

Professional Affiliations

American Academy of Religion (AAR)

Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA)

The Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and Americas (MESEA)

National Council of Black Studies (NCBS)

National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)

Popular Culture and American Culture Associations (PCA/ACA)

Society for the Study of Black Religion (SSBR)

Committees

Diversity and Community (2012-2013)
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (2011-2013)

About

After completing her undergraduate education at Duke University, LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant received a Master of Divinity from Candler School of Theology at Emory University and a PhD in Religion from Emory’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. A proud native of Moncks Corner, South Carolina, she navigates the academy as a scholar-artist, and teaches courses that merge her life as a musician and vocalist with her interdisciplinary specializations in religion, gender, race, music, and popular culture, with a focus on ethnographic methods.

Professor Manigault-Bryant currently has three manuscript projects underway: Her first book, "Ah Tulk to de Dead All de Time": Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women, explores how seven women in the South Carolina lowcountry utilize religion as a means of navigating dynamic changes within Gullah/Geechee culture specifically, and how their experiences transform how we understand the histories of (African) American religious experience. Her second manuscript is an edited volume entitled (Re)Presentations: Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Cultural Productions. This project, which is co-authored with Tamura A. Lomax and Carol B. Duncan, combines womanist and black feminist thought to engage themes that emerge in the popular works of African American playwright, television producer, and filmmaker Tyler Perry. She has also begun research on her second, single-authored monograph entitled Pushing Weight: Religion, Popular Culture, and the Implications of Image, which utilizes film theory, womanist/black feminist thought, and ethnographic data to examine how popular culture and contemporary media forms simultaneously influence mass interpretations of the black female body and the black female body in religious practice. Whether investigating religious practices of specific communities or exploring cultural production at the popular level, critical to her research are questions that unearth how African Americans respond to processes of cultural commodification.

For her creative endeavors, Professor Manigault-Bryant has been the recipient of independent and national grants from the Fund for Theological Education, the Ford Foundation, the Louisville Institute, the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Religion and Theology, Emory University, Wake Forest University, Williams College, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Professor Manigault-Bryant, a former Bolin Fellow, returns to Williams after having taught at Wake Forest University.