Vincent Wimbush, Ph.D.

Director of Institute for Signifying Scriptures

VINCENT L. WIMBUSH, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized scholar of religion, intellectual leader, and academic gadfly, with more than thirty years of advanced graduate-level teaching and research experience. He is author/editor of more than twelve books, including 'White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery,' 'MisReading America: Scriptures and Difference,' 'Theorizing Scriptures,' 'African Americans and the Bible,' and scores of articles and essays. He is founding director of The Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS) (www.signifyingscriptures.org), an international scholarly organization, and is conceptualizer and director of several collaborative trans-disciplinary research projects, including a documentary film (Finding God in the City of Angels) on the ethnography of scriptures. Recipient of numerous awards and research grants, he is past president of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Wimbush’s general teaching and research interests focus on the trans-disciplinary and comparative study of “scriptures” as sharp wedge for critical research and theorizing in the politics of language, social formation, consciousness, and orientation. His particular area of expertise turns around the uses of scriptures in the historical and contemporary circum-Black Atlantic as window onto the larger comparative phenomena and dynamics of scripturalizing and scripturalization.