AAR Member Note

Leonard McKinnis

Awards and Accomplishments

2021 Louisville Institute Sabbatical Grant for Researchers

Leonard McKinnis, Assistant Professor of African American Religion and Black Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been awarded a Louisville Institute Sabbatical Grant.

From the Louisville Institute: 

His project, "Divine Blackness: Christian Imagination in Overcoming Racism," argues for a more elastic understanding of Black religion, and pursues to demonstrate how Ethiopianism performs a fugitive function in the process of identity retrieval and re-construction in the Black Coptic Church, such that the construction of an imagined homeland seeks to de-stabilize notions of the citizen. Divine Blackness, therefore, pursues to nuance the conversation of Black communities of faith in North America via a critical examination of the intersection of race and religion.

Learn More

Louisville Institute logo