Jessica Davenport
Jessica B. Davenport is a scholar of black religion, aesthetics and visual culture. She earned an MA and a Ph.D in religion from Rice University where she completed a dissertation entitled, Appositional Black Aesthetics: Theorizing Black Religion in the Visual Art of Carrie Mae Weems. Her interdisciplinary research interests are broadly concerned with examining how visual depictions of black interior life in art and architecture reflect expansive conceptions of race, gender, sexuality, space and place. Such depictions, she contends, hold significance for how we understand the nature and meaning of black religion. Jessica was a doctoral fellow with The Fund for Theological Education and a Civic Humanist Fellow in Art and Cultural Heritage with the Rice University Humanities Research Center. Currently, Jessica is preparing her first manuscript for publication while coordinating Religious Studies Review, a quarterly journal comprised of reviews of publications across the field of religious studies and related disciplines.