Biography
Roger Sneed is Professor of Religion at Furman University, where he has served as department chair, and later, faculty chair. He is the author of two books, Representations of Homosexuality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought (Ohio State University Press, 2021). His work engages the intersections of African American religious history and thought, sexuality and Christian theology, and religion and science fiction. As a devout Trekkie, he is constantly looking for ways to engage the intersections of science fiction/Afrofuturism and religious thought in order to broaden religious scholarship. Currently, he is on a full year Fulbright, where he is teaching African American religious history and thought and Sexuality and Christian Thought at the Hussite Theological Faculty of Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.
Candidate Statement
When I became a student member of the AAR in 1999, I would never have imagined being nominated to serve on the Board of Directors as Status Committee Director. I remember my first several AAR meetings and seeing people who were on the Board and thinking that would be something reserved only for people who were at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. As a first-generation student, one of the things that poverty and structural/institutional discrimination does is it short-circuits the imagination of possibilities.
In my nearly thirty years as a member of the AAR, I have served as a member of the Black Theology Group, member and later co-chair of the Gay Men and Religion Group, a member of the LGBTIQ Status Committee, member of the Religion and Popular Culture Group, and member of the AAR Program Committee. I have been proud and humbled to have been included in all of these governing groups. I have also been very fortunate to have had mentors who encouraged me along the way and to have colleagues who have shown exemplary models of collegiality.
Over the nearly thirty years that I’ve been in the AAR, I have seen major shifts in the United States concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion. Current sociopolitical forces make the Status Committees a vital necessity for the American Academy of Religion. Given the fierce attempts to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion, it is all the more important for the AAR to stand firmly on the side of radical inclusion.
The Status Committees perform the “heavy lifting” of making sure that the AAR remains diverse, equitable, and inclusive. These committees often have to have difficult conversations—as the landscape of religious/theological studies changes across the nation, the AAR will likely face challenges in terms of recruiting members. Further, as academic institutions focus more on “bottom lines” and scale back departments of religion and as divinity schools/schools of theology face ongoing challenges, graduate students and faculty alike will face increasing administrative burdens that may constrain their ability or willingness to take on committee work within the AAR.
The role of Status Committee Director is a collaborative one. As I have noted to many people, my approach to any leadership role is one of listening, compiling, and imagining paths of action. Having been a co-chair of a Program Unit, and a member of the LGBTIQ Status Committee, I see the goal of the Status Committees as one of identifying new minds, new talent, and new ideas. The Status Committee work is, sometimes, somewhat hidden from the larger membership. It would be a goal of mine to work with the Status Committees on increasing their profile within the organization so they can attract those new minds and new ideas.
Should I be chosen to serve as Status Committee Director, it would be my great honor to work with the Status Committees to identify their particular challenges and work with them to identify possible innovative ways of promoting their work.