Robert M. Baum

|Professor

Academic Appointments

Professor of African and African American Studies
Professor of Religion

Robert Baum was born in Washington, DC and grew up in Silver Spring, MD. He attended Wesleyan University for his bachelor's degree, where he first took a course on Apartheid and decided to concentrate in African history. Upon graduation, he received a Watson Fellowship, which enabled him to spend an entire year in a Diola village in southern Senegal, where he learned the language and began field research before beginning graduate school at Yale University. He returned to Senegal for two more years, and did archival work in London and Paris in preparation of his Ph.D.

His first book, Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Pre-Colonial Senegambia won an American Academy of Religion award for the best first book in the history of religions (2000). He has written numerous articles on the history of Diola religion, field research, religious constructions of gender, indigenous religions and has recently completed a book on the history of Diola women's prophetic movements. He has also played an extensive role in the Ford Foundation funded program "Difficult Dialogues" which trained faculty at the University of Missouri and in other Big Twelve universities in how to deal with controversial issues that have a religious dimension in the university classroom. He has conducted similar workshops for K-12 teachers.

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Contact

Robert.M.Baum@dartmouth.edu

Choate House, Room 203

HB 6036

Department(s)

African and African American Studies

Education

Yale University

Selected Publications

West Africa's Women of God: Alinesitoué and the Diola Prophetic Tradition, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, (November 2016). Finalist for Albert J. Raboteau Prize in Africana Religions.

Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Winner of the American Academy of Religion Award, "Best First Book in the History of Religions," 2000.

Works In Progress

Ancient African Religions: A History, in contract with Oxford University Press.

Calabash, Cross, and Crescent: Twentieth Century African Religious History, in contract with Cambridge University Press.

Women, Rain, and Religion: Prophets in Post-Colonial Senegal.

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African and African American Studies

Department of
African and African American Studies

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