Kyrah Malika DanielsAssistant Professor of African American Studies

Dr. Kyrah Malika Daniels is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She completed her B.A. in Africana Studies from Stanford University and earned her M.A. in Religion and her Ph.D. in African & African American Studies at Harvard University. Professor Daniels teaches courses on Africana religions and art history, material culture and museum studies, and race, religion, and representation. Her research centers on African heritage religions, sacred arts, religious initiation and conversion, and ritual healing traditions in the Black Atlantic. For the 2019-2020 academic year, she was awarded a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art.

Daniels’ first book, Art of the Healing Gods: Illness, Imbalance & Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic (currently under review), is a comparative religion project that examines ritual art traditions and religious healing legacies of Kongo-derived communities in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo-Kinshasa). The book investigates how sacred art objects mediate relationships between humans and spirits in healing ceremonies to treat spiritual illness and imbalance holistically. Daniels’ work has been published in the Journal of Africana Religions, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, the Journal of Haitian Studies, and the Journal for the American Academy of Religion.

Between 2009-2010, Daniels served as Junior Curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Following the earthquake of 2010, she worked in St. Raphael, Haiti, with Lakou Solèy Academic and Cultural Arts Center, a grassroots organization that develops arts-based pedagogy. Previously, she held the first appointment dedicated to African religious heritage traditions and African and African Diaspora art history at Boston College. Daniels currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the Haitian Art Society, Leadership Council Member for the African and Diasporic Religious Studies Association (ADRSA) and as Vice President for KOSANBA, the Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou.