Matt Harper
M.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2003
Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2009
Research Interests
Matt Harper's research focuses on African American history, southern history, and American religious history.
His current project, a book manuscript on black religion and politics in the post-emancipation South, argues that the branch of theology that located African Americans within a divine plan for the race—their eschatology—guided political debates and strategies within southern black communities through the arrival of the Jim Crow era. This project makes black Protestant's diverse religious thought intelligible to the twenty-first-century reader and demonstrates the weight of those theological ideas on the ground and their effect on particular political issues: emancipation and Reconstruction, migration and black land ownership, temperance and prohibition, and disfranchisement and segregation.
View a web version of Dr. Harper's curriculum vitae.