Matthew J. Harper

Ph.D. Student
mjharper@email.unc.edu

Major Field: U.S. History

Other Fields: Religious Studies; African-American History; U.S. South

Advisor: W. Fitzhugh Brundage

Research Interests: Matt Harper's dissertation, "Living in God's Time: African-American Faith and Politics in Post-Emancipation North Carolina," (successfully defended September 2008) argues that black southerners' theology guided their collective action from emancipation to the beginning of the Jim Crow era. Black theology in this time produced both conservative and radical political agendas and set the terms for political debates within African-American communities.  This project makes their rich, diverse, and at times confusing religious thought intelligible to the twenty-first-century reader and demonstrates the weight of those theological ideas on the ground in particular places and particular times. The dissertation focuses on one southern state, North Carolina, to reveal the importance of black theology to local and statewide political issues: emancipation and Reconstruction, migration and black land ownership, temperance and prohibition, and disfranchisement and segregation.