• Kai Parker
• Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
• University of Virginia

Kai Parker is an assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, where he teaches African American religious history. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “Ethiopianism and Apocalypse: Black Protestants, Pan-Africanism, and Crisis in Chicago.” The manuscript is a study of Ethiopianism, defined here as a religious or spiritual conceptualization of Pan-Africanism based in an identification with the “Ethiopia” of the Bible and antiquity. Combining archival historical research, Black studies, and religious studies, the manuscript analyzes how during the great migration from the Jim Crow South to the North, Black Protestants made Chicago the center of an apocalyptic Ethiopianist movement that strived for and anticipated the unveiling of a Pan-African Christian redemption from the antiblack world of sin. Parker is from Harlem and received his Ph.D. in History at the University of Chicago. In Chicago, he also worked as an archivist at the Carter G. Woodson branch of the Chicago Public Library and taught in Stateville Prison as a member of the Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project.

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• Sights and Sounds