Rate My Professor Stephen Finley

Stephen C. Finley is the Inaugural Chair and Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Louisiana State University, where he also holds a professorship in Philosophy and Religious Studies. He earned a PhD and MA from Rice University in 2009, an MDiv from Virginia Union University, and a BA from Pepperdine University. Finley joined the LSU faculty in 2008 and was promoted to full professor in 2024. As the Inaugural Chair, he directs the interdisciplinary department that promotes critical thinking through the study of ideas, practices, theories, and experiences of African, African American, and other diasporic communities.

Finley's research specializations include African American religious traditions, African American religious thought, African American religion and esotericism, religion and psychoanalysis, religion and embodiment, theory and method in the study of religion, and religion in America. His major publications are the monograph In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam (Duke University Press, 2022), the co-edited volume The Religion of White Rage: White Workers, Religious Fervor, and the Myth of Black Racial Progress (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), the co-edited Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: "There Is a Mystery"… (Brill, 2015), and associate editorship of Encyclopedia of African American Religious Cultures (ABC-CLIO, 2009). Key articles include "‘Affirming Our Values’: African American Scholars, White Virtual Mobs, and the Complicity of White University Administrators" (Journal of Academic Freedom, 2018), "The Meaning of ‘Mother’ in Louis Farrakhan’s ‘Mother Wheel’: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Cosmology of the Nation of Islam’s UFO" (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2012), and "God Is a White Racist: Immanent Atheism as a Religious Response to Black Lives Matter and State-Sanctioned Anti-Black Violence" (Journal of Africana Religions, 2015). Finley has given public lectures at Harvard Divinity School, the Esalen Institute Center for Theory and Research, Boston University, Amherst College, and Mississippi State University.