J. Lorand Matory

J. Lorand Matory is Hugh K. Foster Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University. His work addresses African and Afro-Latin religions, especially the Yoruba religion in Nigeria and its Beninese, Brazilian, Haitian, and Cuban diaspora; Afro-Latin religions in the United States; gender, race, and politics in West Africa and Latin America; black immigrants to the United States and Americans of African descent who have not always considered themselves black (e.g., mulattoes, Louisiana Creoles, Ramapo Mountain people, and Lumbee Indians); sacrifice, spirit possession, syncretism, and gender in cross-cultural perspectives; and metaphor theory. The author of Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion, his forthcoming book The Trans-Atlantic Nation Tradition, Transnationalism & Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble, concerns gender and nationalism in and around an Afro-Brazilian religion known as Candomble.

He has also written articles, reviews, encyclopedia entries, and conference papers concerning West Africa, Latin America, the cultural links between Africa and the Americas, and black ethnics in the United States. In addition, he is an associate editor of American Ethnologist and serves on Harvard's Committee of the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Faculty Advisory Council on the Social Sciences of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard, and the advisory board of GLO, a journal of Gay and Lesbian studies.

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