Faculty

Jualynne Elizabeth Dodson is a native of Pensacola, Florida and spent her formative Years within African American Geechee culture.  She completed the Masters and Ph.D. Degrees in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.  She completed a Graduate Research year at the Institute of the Black world in Atlanta Georgia and returned to that city to organize and direct the Research and Demonstration Center for the Atlanta University School of Social Work.  She left Atlanta to complete a Scholar in Residence at Garrett Seminary on the Northwestern University campus.

      Dr. Dodson moved to New York City, completed the PhD dissertation and served as Dean of Seminary Life at Union Theological Seminary.  She taught at Yale University, Hunter College and the University of Colorado, Boulder.  She held a Ford Foundation Post-doctorate Fellowship with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, a Fellowship at the Center for the Study of American Religion at Princeton University, was a Post-doctorate Fellow at the Womanist Institute at the University of Georgia in Athens, and held the John A. Hannah Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Michigan State University.  In 2006 Professor Dodson received the Outstanding Faculty Member Award for 2005-2006 academic year.  This is an award given by the MSU Senior Class Council.

      In 1996 at the University Of Colorado, Boulder, Dodson organized the African Atlantic Research Team (AART), a mentoring collective aimed at increasing the number of students of color who successfully pursue an academic Ph.D.  She continues to direct AART and the Team has become successful at MSU.  Activities have included mentoring six McNair Scholars through undergraduate graduation, guiding another four undergraduate students into solid academic graduate programs (including one Marshall Scholar), convening Mock Interview Sessions for students to practice articulating research projects, a Symposium on the 110th Anniversary of Plessy vs Ferguson, and a series of Living Room Conversations with outstanding academic scholars of color.  In addition, AART has provided students with guidance for their cross-cultural and international presentations of their research projects while sustaining a Research Team of more than 15 members whose average GPA is at 3.89. 

      Jualynne Dodson's current academic research focuses on issues of “Culture and Religion of African Descendants In the Americas.”  She is on the Board of Directors of the Association for Study of World African Diaspora, contributes critical perspective to recent books on religions and/of African descendants, and annually co-organizes the North American and Cuban Philosophers & Social Scientist Research Network in Havana, Cuba.  She is a regular panel presenter for the “Religious Roundtables” at the Annual Festival del Fuego, convened in Santiago de Cuba.   Prof. Dodson publications include Engendered Church: Women, Power, and the AME Church, numerous articles in national and international journals, and her most recent book is the first in the University of New Mexico's Charles H. Long Series, “Religion in the Americas: Religion, Rims, & Boundaries.”  The book, Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions of Oriente Cuba reports on findings from several years of field research in the eastern provinces of the island nation.

101 Morrill Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824
(517) 432-8668
dodsonj2@msu.edu

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