Justine M. Bakker
Radboud University Nijmegen
Bio
Justine M. Bakker earned her PhD in Religion from Rice University (Houston, TX) in May 2020. Her dissertation looks at the work of poet M. NourbeSe Philip, novelist Fred D’Aguiar and visual artist Ellen Gallagher to rethink the categories of “religion” and “the human.” The project straddles religious studies, black critical theory, and the blue humanities; the final year of dissertation writing was supported by the Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship (administered by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation). In the upcoming year, she will revise this dissertation into a manuscript for publication under the title Demonic Oceans: Parareligious Stories in the African Diaspora. After Rice, Justine returned to the Netherlands, where she is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Critical Philosophy of Race at Radboud University. Here, she is working on a project that utilizes frameworks and concepts black studies to investigate the ways race shaped the field of religious studies since its inception in the late nineteenth century. She has recent essays in the journal Religion (2020) and the edited volumes Esotericism and African American Religious Experience (2015), Hermes Explains (2019) and New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism (2021). She is the book review editor for Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism.