Josef Sorett

Josef Sorett serves as dean of Columbia College, the Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor and Vice President for Undergraduate Education at Columbia University. As the chief academic and executive officer of the College, Dean Sorett’s central focus is to ensure that students have the best possible experience inside and outside the classroom. As an interdisciplinary scholar of religion and race in the Americas, and a professor of religion, African American and African diaspora studies, Sorett employs primarily historical and literary approaches to the study of religion in Black communities and cultures in the United States, straddling the disciplines of history, literature, religion, art and music. His first book, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics, illuminates how religion has figured in debates about Black art and culture across the 20th century. In addition to editing the recently released volume The Sexual Politics of Black Churches, Dean Sorett’s forthcoming second book, Black is a Church: Christianity and the Contours of African American Life, will be published in 2023. He is working on a third, There’s a God on the Mic: Hip Hop’s (Surprising) Religious History. Sorett’s scholarly work has been supported with grants from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the E. Rhodes and Leone B. Carpenter Foundation, the Arcus Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Louisville Institute, the Forum for Theological Exploration, and Yale University’s Institute for Sacred Music. His research has been published in academic journals and anthologies; and his writing and commentary have also appeared in a range of popular media outlets, including ABC News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, as well as on the BBC and NPR.