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Robert Baum

Associate Professor and Chair
Education: Ph.D.,
Interest: Indigenous Religions
Email: baumr@missouri.edu

Since joining the Religious Studies Department, in 2005, I have taught courses in Indigenous Religions (African, Australasian, and Native American), Islam, and the history of religions. Since the end of August, I have served as chair of the Religious Studies Department. I am an affiliated faculty in Women and Gender Studies and in Black Studies, as well as the Afro-Romance Institute, and an associate faculty in the Folklore Program. In my three years at the University of Missouri, I have also been active in developing an African Studies Initiative for the Campus and have beeen active in the Center for Arts and Humanities, the Pew Center on Religion and the Professions, and the Ford Foundations Difficult Dialogues Initiative. In Difficult Dialogues, one of my roles has been to provide a basic understanding of Islam and issues confronting Muslim students at the University of Missouri. From 1998 until 2005, I taught in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Iowa State University, focusing on Religion and Politics, African Religions, and Islam. Before coming to Iowa State, I was a Resident Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, at Harvard University. At Iowa State, I taught world religions, Islamic Civilization, African Religions, Religion and Imperialism, Religion and Politics, Concepts of Gender in African, American Indian, and Australasian Religions, and Theory and Method in the Study of Religion. I was an affiliated faculty member of Women’s Studies Program and was on the advisory committee of African American Studies at Iowa State. I chaired the African Studies Committee and served on the President’s Advisory Committee on Diversity.

My research focuses on African religious and social history, especially the history of Diola religion in Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau (West Africa). This work, focused as it is on indigenous African religions, takes place within the context of a Senegalese state that is over eighty percent Muslim. I also work in African religious history in general (including African Islam and Christianity), African diaspora religions, religious responses to imperialism and to racism, and the religious construction of gender. My first book, Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) examines the history of Diola religion during the precolonial era, with particular attention on the impact of the Atlantic slave trade. It also includes important materials on the history of women’s fertility cults. This work received a prize from the American Academy of Religion, for the best first book in the history of religions.

My current research focuses on the history of Diola prophets, people claiming direct revelation from the supreme being within an indigenous African religion. Prior to the French occupation in the late nineteenth century, there were eleven prophets, all of whom were men. Since French colonization there have been forty-two prophets, most of whom are women. Thus I am examining the both the intensification of a Diola prophetic tradition and its transformation from an exclusively male phenomena to a predominantly female one. Of particular importance among these recent prophets is their detailed and profound critique of French colonial and Senegalese post-colonial agricultural development schemes. I am also conducting research on a continent-wide history of African religions. In connection with that project I have conducted some field research, in Egypt, Morocco, Gambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. At a comparative level, I've written the Indigenous Religions chapter for the Oxtoby and Segal, Concise Introduction to World Religions, which examines the category of “indigenous” religions, including materials on African, Native American Religions, and Australasia and East Asian indigenous religions.

While in Iowa, I served as a Humanities Iowa Speaker on issues related to Islam and on the Board of Directors of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union. A DVD lecture I gave to the Muslim Student Association of Iowa, on the shared religious traditions of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, has become available. At a national level, I served two terms on the Board of Directors of the West African Research Association, a Fulbright-funded research program whose center in Dakar, Senegal facilitates West African research and a term on the Board of Directors of the North American Association for the Study of Religion. I am one of the two founders of the African Religions Group of the American Academy of Religion.

My formal education includes a Ph.D. in African History, with minor fields in African Religions (including African Traditional Religions, Islam, and Christianity) and Modern South Asian Religions. My B.A. with High Honors in History was from Wesleyan University. After graduating from Wesleyan, I received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study Diola religion in Senegal. In 1974, I began to live in a southern Diola community, learned the language, and have continued to return there to conduct historical and ethnographic research. I have spent nearly four and a half years in Senegal; have conducted limited research in other African countries including Egypt, Morocco, Uganda, Gambia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe; and government and missionary archival research in Senegal, France, Portugal, and the United Kingdom.

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last update: fall 2008

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