James Howard Hill, Jr., Ph.D., is a theorist of religion and culture, an educator, a writer, and an author of children’s stories. His work moves at the intersection of faith, imagination, memory, and the haunting traces of history. Through writing, teaching, workshops, and creative practice, Dr. Hill invites others to linger with the braided tensions of beauty and horror, the fantastic and the maddening, good and evil—those liminal spaces where meaning is made, undone, and made again. His work is deeply shaped by his own story as a Ph.D.-holding survivor of childhood trauma, and he approaches each project—academic or creative—as an act of witness and care, inviting others to tarry with what is often unspoken, unseen, or unresolved.

Dr. Hill currently holds the position of Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Boston University. He holds a B.A. from Criswell College, an M.T.S. from Southern Methodist University, and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. He teaches courses and conducts research in black study, religion and the politics of popular culture in the United States, political theory, black political thought, modernity, ecology, and coloniality, and conceptual methodologies informing the study of religion. Dr. Hill is the author of two forthcoming book: “The Michael Jackson Cacophony: Religion and the Politics of Black Popular Culture, 1963-1989″ (under contract with University of Chicago Press Class 200: New Studies in Religion series) and In Praise of the Haunting Fantastic: Faith, Education, and Overcoming Childhood Adversity (under contract with Fortress Press). His scholarship has received recognition and support from The Crossroads Project, The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (Heidelberg, Germany), The Henry Luce Foundation, the Forum for Theological Exploration, The Louisville Institute, Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and the Mellon Cluster Research Fellowship in Comparative Race and Diaspora studies.  

His public commentary on issues of race, popular culture, sports, politics, and religion can be read in Black Agenda Report, The Syndicate, Black Perspectives, and The Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, among other outlets.