Denson Staples is a PhD candidate in Religion with a secondary field in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
Denson studies the vibrant exchange between African American religious and literary cultures with particular attention to the traffic between African American theology and literature in the late twentieth century. Drawing from theological, literary, and archival sources, Denson’s dissertation analyzes the uses of literary texts—ranging from novels and short stories to literary criticism and reportage in the black press—in watershed moments of African American religious thought, such as the emergence of black liberation theology and womanist thought. As a Teaching Fellow in Harvard College’s General Education program, Department of English, and at Harvard Divinity School, Denson has helped teach courses on the cultural history of various U.S. social movements of the 1960s and 1970s; decolonial theory; the twentieth-century intellectual history of sex, gender, and sexuality; the twentieth-century American novel; literary modernism; and the neo-slave narrative. In partnership with various educational institutions and community organizations, Denson has designed curricula and trainings on theologies of abolition, writing theology, and twentieth-century black feminist poetry.
Denson’s work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Forum for Theological Education, the Louisville Institute, and Harvard GSAS’s Predissertation Fellowship, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and Jens Aubrey Westengard Fund.
Denson received both an MA in English Literature and an MDiv from Harvard and a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia.