Khytie Brown is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University with disciplinary foci in religion and anthropology. She received her B.A. from Emory University in Sociology and Religion and her M.T.S from Harvard Divinity School with an area concentration in Religion and The Social Sciences. Her research interests include religious expression and cultural production in the Caribbean and Latin America, sensory epistemologies, gender and sexuality, social media technologies, racialization and the interplay between private religious discourses and public space.
A native Jamaican, and Atlanta resident, Khytie received a joint B.A.in Sociology and Religion from Emory University in 2010, where she was a Mellon Mays Fellow. Believing strongly in scholar-activism, Khytie has served as mentor for the Harvard Prison Education Project, a steering committee member for the W.E.B Du Bois Graduate Society and advisory board member for the African and Diasporic Religious Studies Association (ADRSA). She is also a doctoral fellow in the Science, Religion and Culture program and has been a graduate student associate at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
Currently, she serves as the lead research associate in a collaborative ethnographic team—the flagship project of the Center on Transnational Policing at Princeton University—researching police use of force in New Orleans.
My disciplines and areas of professional expertise include…
- African and African American Studies
- African Diaspora
- Africana Studies
- Anthropology of Religion
- Black Studies
- Cultural Anthropology
- Gender and Sexuality Studies
- Humanities
- Latin American and Caribbean Studies
- Religion
- Social Media
Current work
My current research is based on ethnographic research in Jamaica, Panama, the United States and Canada, that examines Revival Zion, an understudied African-derived form of Christianity that is increasingly spreading across the world through transnational migrations and the proliferation of digital technologies. Revival has become increasingly stigmatized due to its association with witchcraft, and more recently, ostensibly queer male practitioners. Whereas scholarship on African diaspora religions has tended to focus on Cuba, Brazil and Haiti, there has been even less research on the role of gender and sexuality in African-derived religious practices. Seen as a typically prohibited topic, many researchers have shied away from conducting an in-depth analysis of these concerns. As a trance-based religion, Revivalists see themselves as spiritually traveling through ritual journeys and are also increasingly physically traveling across borders to Panama and North America to practice with other stigmatized practitioners. In bringing these two forms of journeying together, my dissertation shows how Revival Zion practitioners create deterritorialized queer networks of Black religious subject and illuminates how religio-social relations are also sense-based relations.