About the Author
Dianne M. Stewart is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University specializing in African heritage religious cultures in the Caribbean and the Americas and womanist religious thought and praxis. Stewart’s research has been supported by prestigious national and international fellowships. In 2025, the John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation named her a Fellow among its 100th class of 198 fellows out of nearly 3,500 applicants. Previously, she was a Fulbright Scholar, a Senior Fellow at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and an Emory College of Arts and Sciences Chronos Faculty Fellow. She is the author of Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (Oxford University Press, 2005), Black Women, Black Love: America’s War on African American Marriage (Seal Press, 2020) and Obeah, Orisa and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II, Orisa: Africana Nations and the Power of Black Sacred Imagination (Duke University Press, 2022). Her work has also been published in The Washington Post, Oprah Daily, and other outlets.
Beyond her research in Trinidad and Jamaica, Stewart has studied, conducted research and lectured in a number of African, Latin American, and Caribbean countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, the Republic of Benin, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Bermuda. Stewart has also served on several committees within the American Academy of Religion, she serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Africana Religions, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. She is also a founding co-editor, with Jacob Olupona and Terrence Johnson, of the Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People series at Duke University Press.
Stewart’s Black Women, Black Love is her first public-facing book. Expanding her contributions to the field of African American Studies, and inspired by her pedagogical investment in Black love studies and her courses, Black Love, The Power of Black Self-Love, (co-taught with Professor Dona Troka) and Black Women, Black Love and the Pursuit of Happiness, Stewart spent a number of years researching and writing Black Women, Black Love. Intended to reach wide academic and public audiences, the book examines the structural forces that, across four centuries, have made coupling and marriage difficult, delayed or impossible for millions of Black women in the United States and reveals how White supremacy has systematically broken the heart of Black America.
Stewart obtained her B.A. degree from Colgate University in English and African American Studies, a M. Div. degree from Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. degree in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. A celebrated classroom teacher and mentor, Stewart also holds the Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award, Emory College of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Advising Award, Emory University Laney Graduate School’s Eleanor Main Graduate Faculty Mentor Award, and the Laney Graduate School’s Faculty Award for Inclusive Excellence in the Humanities. Among her service contributions, Stewart is most proud of her seventeen-year leadership of Emory’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, a national initiative committed to supporting demographic transformation in higher education and to promoting the value of multivocality in the humanities and its related disciplines.
Stewart was born in Kingston, Jamaica and raised in a nurturing Caribbean immigrant and African American community in Hartford, Connecticut’s North End.
