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. Denson’s dissertation, entitled “Canon: Tradition and Freedom in Twentieth-Century African American Theological and Cultural Criticism”, explores how and why the idea of canon was invoked by exponents of radical black religious thought in the second half of the twentieth century. As a Teaching Fellow in Harvard College’s General Education program 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, and the twentieth-century intellectual history of sex, gender, and sexuality. In partnership with various educational institutions and community organizations, Denson has designed curricula and trainings on race and ethnicity, conflict transformation, and religion and social transformation, such as a recent curriculum on theologies of abolition.

Denson's work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Forum for Theological Education, the Louisville Institute, and GSAS’s Predissertation Fellowship 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.