Red Emma’s

When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space.

Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an anti-black world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms—ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more—to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions.

Dr. Ahmad Greene-Hayes is an Assistant Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School and a member of the Standing Committee for the Study of Religion and the Standing Committee on Advanced Degrees in American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. A social historian and critical theorist, Greene-Hayes is an accomplished scholar and teacher, and his research interests include critical Black Studies, Black Atlantic Religions in the Americas, and race, queerness, and sexuality in the context of African American and Caribbean religious histories. He earned his B.A. from Williams College, his M.A. and Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University, and certificates in African American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies.

He is the author of(https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo245100357.html)UNDERWORLD WORK: BLACK ATLANTIC RELIGION-MAKING IN JIM CROW NEW ORLEANS, which is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in the Class 200: New Studies in Religion series in May 2025, and he has published essays in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Journal of Africana Religions, Nova Religio, GLQ, _and the Journal of African American History, _among others. Greene-Hayes has held prestigious fellowships from Yale’s LGBT Studies program, the American Society of Church History, and Princeton’s “The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures,” to name a few. In 2022, he was inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College, and in 2023, he was inducted into the historic Society for the Study of Black Religion.

Dr. Greene-Hayes is a steering committee member for the Afro-American Religious History Unit and the Religion and Sexuality Unit at the American Academy of Religion, and he served as an advisory board member for the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network from 2019-2024. In conversation with his research, he has consulted and collaborated with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics, and Social Justice at Columbia University, the African American Policy Forum, Black Women’s Blueprint, and a host of other nonprofit organizations, churches, and other community institutions.

He is currently on sabbatical as a long-term fellow at the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University working on his next project tentatively titled, LITTLE RICHARD’S WITNESS: LINER NOTES ON BLACK RELIGION AND SEXUALITY_, _which is under contract with Penguin Random House in the Significations series.