Brendan Jamal Thornton, Ph.D. is a cultural anthropologist and specialist on religion and culture in the Caribbean. His research and scholarship are interdisciplinary in scope and have been published in what are generally considered to be the top journals in the fields of anthropology, religious studies, and Latin American studies, including, Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and Latin American Research Review. His first book, Negotiating Respect: Pentecostalism, Masculinity, and the Politics of Spiritual Authority in the Dominican Republic (University Press of Florida 2016) was awarded the 2017 Barbara T. Christian Literary Award for the best book in the humanities by the international Caribbean Studies Association.
His current book project looks to trouble the taken-for-granted correspondences between race, religion, and cosmology by exploring their disjunctures and novel articulations in the context of Spiritual Baptist Christianity, an important but understudied Afro-Caribbean religious tradition in Trinidad and Tobago. In addition to engaging important and enduring disciplinary concerns about religious and cultural difference, this project situates itself within existing scholarship on religion in the African diaspora, identity politics, and the anthropology of religion.