Dr. Alexia Williams

Biography

Alexia Williams is an Assistant Professor specializing in Religion and African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she also serves as Co-director of Graduate Studies in Religion. Her research focuses on Afro-American religious history, Roman Catholicism, and Afro-diasporic religions in a hemispheric context, as well as American secularism. Dr. Williams's work explores how religious communities operate as sites for racial identity formation, political organizing, and aesthetic production among Black Americans. She is currently working on an ongoing book project titled 'Black Revolutionary Saints: Roman Catholicism & U.S. Racial Imagination,' which examines the efforts of Catholic laity to canonize African American saints within the Roman Catholic tradition. This project is particularly significant as it investigates the Vatican’s recognition of saints of African American descent and how the veneration of such figures plays a crucial role in the advocacy for racial justice within Catholic communities and institutions. Dr. Williams contextualizes the political discourses and aesthetic productions inspired by potential saints against the backdrop of 20th and 21st-century American social movements and public life. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and African American Studies from Yale University and a B.A. in English and Spanish from Spelman College. Prior to her appointment at the University of Illinois, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. Her research has been supported by the UNCF Mellon Mays Program, the Ford Foundation, and the Louisville Institute.

Research Interests

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