Amaryah Shaye Armstrong

Amaryah Armstrong is an assistant professor of race in American religion and culture at Virginia Tech. Her research cuts across the fields of Black Studies, American Studies, Political Theology, and Continental Philosophy of Religion to explore the relationship between religion and the reproduction of race in the aftermath of 1492. She is working on two projects. The first, Reproducing Peoplehood: On the Afterlife of Christian Order, brings together black feminist theories of reproduction, American religious history, political theology, and black women’s post-Reconstruction literature to examine how the reproductive is critical to understanding the racial afterlife of Christian peoplehood. In so doing, Amaryah shows how theologies of peoplehood operate as reproductive technologies in the formation and preservation of antiblack and black feminist political theologies. The second project, A Measure of Existence: On the Value of Black Theology, develops a critical rereading of James Cone’s announcement of black theology in light of theories of blackness and value, racial capitalism, and theological accounts of economy. She also has several articles in the works on the insights of various black intellectuals (W.E.B. Du Bois, Hortense Spillers) and the relationship between black culture and political theology.