Kai Parker

Gibson Hall Room 352

Education

• Ph.D., History, University of Chicago
• M.A., History, University of Chicago
• A.B., History and Africana Studies, Bowdoin College

Research Interests

I am an historian of African American religion who researches how apocalyptic and messianic strains of Black religion have inspired Black social movements, cultural production, and intellectual thought while illuminating the affinities and tensions between conceptions of redemption and freedom. I study the religious history of urban inequality, religion in Black music and popular culture, Ethiopianism, colonial and anticolonial missiology, theologies of prison reform and prison abolition, and the intersection of religion, imperialism, and social theory. My research combines the archival methods of history with conceptual insights drawn from theology as well as Black studies’ engagements with phenomenology. Additionally, I have taught courses on Black history, Black religion, and Black studies at Stateville maximum-security prison near Chicago as a member of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project.

Publications

Kai Parker, City of Black Souls: Chicago, Ethiopianism, and the Black Apocalyptic Imagination (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). 

•    My book uncovers the history of an unsung anti-imperialist, apocalyptic religious movement: Ethiopianism in Black Chicago. I show how from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, Black Protestants in Chicago drew from biblical representations of “Ethiopia” as well as Coptic and Ethiopian Orthodox traditions and worked with West African Protestants to link the struggle for spiritual flourishing and redemption with the fight against imperialism. To illuminate the emergence and impact of Chicago’s “apocalyptic Ethiopianism,” I examine Ida B. Wells’s Ethiopianism, the anticolonial mission organizing that connected Black Baptists in Chicago and Nigeria, varieties of gospel music, visual artist William Edouard Scott’s painting the Great Migration as the biblical and apocryphal Flight into Egypt, the Ethiopianist critique of capitalism during the Great Depression, religious literature in the Chicago Defender, churches organizing to help defend Ethiopia against Fascist invasion, and the intersection of Ethiopianism, decolonization, and the civil rights movement.

Click here for a review of City of Black Souls in The Christian Century.

Peer-Reviewed Articles/Book Chapters

• Kai Parker, “A Messianism of Dissonance: Chicago Churches and the Charisma of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Modern American History (forthcoming 2027).
• Kai Parker, “The Revelation of John Chilembwe: Apocalypticism, the Afro-Baptist Diaspora, and the Black Radical Tradition,” in Vaughn A. Booker, Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Judith Weisenfeld, and Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, eds., Africana Religions in America and the Challenges of History (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, 2027).
• Kai Parker, “The Wretched and the Damned: Gospel Music between Civil Rights and Urban Crisis,” Black Theology 24:1 (2026): 3-25.
• Kai Parker, “Desegregationist Pan-African Spiritual Strivings: Du Bois, the ‘Negro Church,’ and the Critique of Imperialism,” Journal of Religious History (2026).
• Kai Parker, “Cast Down Your Bucket on the Mountaintop: Bookerism and the Sociology of Caste in Black Gandhian Christian Thought,” Journal of Black Religious Thought 3:2 (2024): 93-116.
• Kai Parker with R. Noll, “Freedom as Staying: Race, Religious History, and Carceral Ethnography in Chicago,” in Sarada Balagopala, Cati Coe, and Keith Green, eds., Diverse Unfreedoms: The Afterlives and Transformations of Post-Transatlantic Bondages (New York: Routledge, 2020), 161-179.
• Caine Jordan, Guy Emerson Mount, and Kai Perry Parker, “‘A disgrace to all slaveholders’: The University of Chicago’s Founding Ties to Slavery and the Path to Reparations,” Journal of African American History 103:1-2 (Winter/Spring 2018): 163-178.

Teaching

• The Black Church
• Black Religion and the Criminal Justice System
• African American Religious History (grad seminar)
• Historiography Seminar in U.S. Religions (grad seminar)
• Questions in the Study of Religion
• Black Apocalyptic Theory (grad tutorial)