Corey D. B. Walker
Associate Professor:
Department of Africana Studies
Phone: +1 401 863 9545
cdbwalker@brown.edu
My research program revolves around a series of critical investigations into the historical, philosophical, and theological problems of modern thought and political practice.
Biography
Corey D. B. Walker is Associate Professor in the department of Africana Studies where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy, critical theory, modern theology, and cultural studies. His research revolves around a series of critical investigations into the historical, philosophical, and theological problems of modern thought and political practice.
Prior to joining the faculty at Brown in 2006, Professor Walker was Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia (2003-2006), Director of the Center for the Study of Local Knowledge at the University of Virginia (2002-2003), and Visiting Professor at the Historisches Institut at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena in Germany (2002).
Professor Walker is the author of the book, A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (University of Illinois Press, 2008) and is now completing work on a new book entitled Between Transcendence and History: An Essay on Religion and the Future of Democracy in America. Professor Walker also serves as an Associate Editor of The Journal of the American Academy of Religion the top academic journal for the study of religion.
Interests
My research program revolves around a series of critical investigations into the philosophical and theological problems of modern thought and political practice.
My first book, A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America, is broadly concerned with establishing some preliminary considerations for rethinking the connections between the cognitive processes and cultural practices of voluntary associations and articulations of democracy in America. The book marks a preliminary attempt to understand how African Americans used voluntary associations to rationalize the meanings of freedom, equality, and national belonging in the United States. This project utilizes the formation of African American freemasonry to explore the cultural, political, and theoretical dimensions of the struggle for democracy in America. A Noble Fight not only maps the discursive logics of the language of freemasonry as a metaphoric rendering of American democracy, but also develops an alternative approach to how and in what manner associational formations inform the production of particular ideas and expressions of democracy in America. The interdisciplinary methods and strategies advanced in A Noble Fight open up new avenues for dialogically interrogating theories and formations of knowledge, politics, and cultural practices.
My current book project entitled Between Transcendence and History: Theology, Critical Theory, and the Politics of Liberation is a critical theological project deeply attentive to the contradictions that mark the cultural, economical, epistemological, and political conjuncture of our contemporary moment. By gesturing to the space "between" transcendence and history, this work explicitly calls into question each category as adequate in and of themselves for critical theological thinking and implicitly questions the apparent dichotomy that informs the construction of their formal opposition. However, inasmuch as each category is marked by a lack and remain under erasure, they remain essential, indeed indispensable, for the task of critical theology. To this end, Between Transcendence and History proceeds in the face of this im/possibility in entering into a conversation with contemporary critical theory in order to facilitate the creation of a renewed theological engagement that not only challenges the limits of discourses about g/G*d, but also articulates a robust theological vision in/formed by the multiplex of human experience as well as the possibilities of human flourishing. Indeed, Between Transcendence and History announces a new kind of theological thinking that recasts the very im/possibilities of theology in our current moment. Such a theology, or rather theological thinking, is one that most critically informs a radical and viable cultural and political politics of liberation. This project draws on the works of an eclectic range of thinkers, including the critical and aesthetic theories of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, the political thought of Giorgio Agamben, Jürgen Habermas, Ernesto Laclau, and Karl Marx, the philosophical work of Jacques Derrida, Enrique Dussel, and Emmanuel Levinas, and the theological work of James Cone, Catherine Keller, Martin Luther King, Jr., Charles Long, and Hent de Vries. The notions of the "ethics of opacity" and "theological thinking" are two of the central concepts that organize this text and are the subject of several soon to be published essays.
Another book project that I am working on is tentatively titled Representations of the Black Intellectual. This project charts the contours of African American intellectual life at the turn of the century. I seek to investigate the development of the first generation of African American intellectuals who undertook academic studies at European universities in an era marked by heightened racial tension, rapidly advancing capitalist economic development, and the pronounced expansion and international influence of the United States. In so far as these individuals gained an international perspective during their educational journey, I am interested in how this experience influenced their theoretical and political approaches and activities. As a result of their experiences, how did they understand their role and function as intellectuals? In what ways did study and living abroad shape these intellectuals as they assumed professorial positions at some of the leading historically black colleges and universities such as Howard, Fisk, and Atlanta Universities? How and in what manner did they deal with the politics of academic apartheid that characterized higher education in the United States? The social, cultural, and intellectual influence of these individuals and their European experiences, combined with their marginal location in American and African American society, are critical components to understanding the dynamics of African American thought at historically black institutions and to comprehending the manner and mode in which this stratum of the Talented Tenth navigated the contested terrain of American democracy.
These book length studies critically inform my understanding of the relations of knowledge, power, and politics in our contemporary moment. As such, I will continue to develop research projects that focus on the question of the production, reproduction, and political implications of the global flows of legitimated knowledges – particularly knowledges secured with a "God claim" – in the modern world. Critically informed by the insights of such thinkers as Pierre Bourdieu, Barbara Christian, Enrique Dussel, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, C.L.R. James, Martin Luther King, Jr., Walter Mignolo, Edward Said, Hortense Spillers, and Roberto Unger, I seek to explore the limits of contemporary theories of emancipatory thinking, particularly those forms that either evade the theological dimension of thought or those forms that (un)consciously instantiate new forms of theological imperialism, in the hope of devising new theoretical strategies that offer the possibility of an eruption of "subjugated knowledges." My work in this area is being advanced by conversations with an international collective of scholars and activists who meet annually to discuss respective research projects and possibilities for the development of alternative epistemic theories and political practices with the aim of challenging existing hierarchies of knowledge and power.
Degrees
Ph.D., The College of William and Mary, 2001; M.T.S., Harvard University, 1999; M.Div., Virginia Union University, 1998; B.S., Norfolk State University, 1993
Awards
Sesquicentennial Associateship, University of Virginia, 2006-2007
Ph.D. Dissertation Nominated for the American Studies Association Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize, 2002
Ford Foundation Fellowship, Ford Foundation and National Research Council, 2000-2002
Summer Research Fellowship, The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, University of Virginia, 2000
Research Travel Fellowship, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, 2000
Stephen J. Wright Commonwealth Graduate Fellowship, The College ofWilliam and Mary, 1999-2000
Bellevue Heights American Baptist Foundation Seminary Fellowship, Virginia Union University, 1996-1997
Affiliations
Associate Editor, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2006-2010
Book Review Editor, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2005-2006
American Academy of Religion (AAR)
American Historical Association (AHA)
American Philosophical Association (APA)
American Studies Association (ASA)
Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA)
Society for the Study of Black Religion, elected 2004.
Teaching
Professor Walker teaches courses in Africana philosophy, critical theory, modern theology, and cultural studies. He has served on six doctoral dissertation committees in the areas of Religious Studies and English and currently serves as a reader on three doctoral dissertations. Professor Walker has administered doctoral comprehensive exams in African American Religious Thought, Philosophical Theology, and Theology and Contemporary Theory.
Funded Research
Sesquicentennial Associateship, University of Virginia, 2006-2007
Ford Foundation Fellowship, Ford Foundation and National Research Council, 2000-2002
Summer Research Fellowship, The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, University of Virginia, 2000
Research Travel Fellowship, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, 2000
Stephen J. Wright Commonwealth Graduate Fellowship, The College of William and Mary, 1999-2000
Bellevue Heights American Baptist Foundation Seminary Fellowship, Virginia Union University, 1996-1997
Web Links
Curriculum Vitae
Download Corey D. B. Walker's Curriculum Vitae in PDF Format