HDS Student Papers

This thesis is a study of m. nourbeSe philip’s 2008 long poem Zong! and Torkwase Dyson’s 2025 sound pavilion Akua. In this study, I pay attention to how each woman discusses and (de)constructs the colonial archive through their commitment to care and communion in communal engagement and through the formal properties of the poetry, performance, sound, and design that comprise their work. Engaging their projects individually, in tandem, and with discourses from archival theory, Black religious studies, Black feminist thought, critical theory, and Black visual studies, I grapple with the possibility and ethics of their projects of spiritual care for the living and the dead. Writing from my experiences of these artists’ works, I present black archival spiritual care, art-centered spiritual communion, and compositional abstraction as analytics through which to critically read the ministerial connotations of their projects.

This thesis examines how Black girls enter and remain within institutional archives through histories of racial violence, premature death, and dispossession. Grounded in womanist thought, anthropology, Africana religious studies, spiritual care, and Black studies, this research argues that the archive is an active site where Black bodies continue to be subjected to material and spiritual violence. Through an examination of the “Venus,” this paper argues that there is a historical lineage of Black girls who enter the archive through conditions of subjugation. Katricia “Tree” Africa, one of the children killed in the 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a central case for this thesis. After the MOVE bombing, Katricia Africa’s remains were held for decades within academic institutions. This thesis explores how the archive renders Black girls legible only through violence and their death. This paper employs an interdisciplinary methodological approach drawing from Black studies, anthropology, religious studies, and womanist thought. I approach the archive as an active site shaped by power, violence, and institutions. For this paper, the archive refers to a place where information, documents, records, or bodies are held. This methodological approach seeks to understand the particularity of how Black girls enter the archive while also attending to what exceeds the archive’s capacity to capture their interior lives. Traditional historical methods prioritize recovery, completeness, or evidentiary accumulation, which are insufficient for addressing the ethical demands raised by the manner in which Black girls, such as Katricia Africa, enter the archive. This methodology resists extractive, normative research practices that treat Black death as an object of study divorced from the researcher’s own ethical stakes. Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation is used in this research as a theoretical framework for narrating and understanding lives irrecoverable by violence. Michael Omi and Howard Winant provide a theoretical framework for racialization to understand the systemic process by which Black girls enter the archive. This thesis calls for ethical and spiritually informed approaches to Black human remains in the archive and asks what it means to tell these stories and allow Black girls to finally rest beyond the violence of the archive.

The paper examines various models of co-leadership or other forms of collaborative shared ministry among Unitarian Universalist (UU) religious professionals, evaluates both the potential positive and negative impacts of such models, and outlines best practices for how to establish, embed and maintain them.

The author analyzes the models within the specific polity and theological heritage of Unitarian Universalism, including the ways that that heritage has historically both enabled and challenged systems of oppression. He contends that current leadership structures in UU congregations often perpetuate and enable paradigms of patriarchy and white supremacist culture which exclude people of color, queer people, and other historically marginalized people, and so inhibit further growth and diversity in the faith. In order to address various financial, demographic, and governance challenges that Unitarian Universalism currently faces as well as more profound religious and moral issues of equity and inclusion, it is necessary to challenge and deconstruct those paradigms, and erase false preconceptions as to what may be possible within the inherited structures of the denomination.

Theologically, the paper also evaluates the implications of UU values and principles for leadership models among religious professionals. The author argues that alternative leadership structures are fully compatible with the newly articulated Shared Values of Unitarian Universalism, and will help promote and expand Beloved Community.

If properly implemented, new models for ministry and leadership can inspire UUs to imagine a brighter and more optimistic future for their faith – and by extension for the culture, politics, and socio-economic dynamics of the wider society.

This essay is about praying and acting. It is about acting and praying, each: earnestly, intentionally, and thoughtfully. Fundamentally, this essay is about how the processes of praying and acting similarly cultivate within a practitioner an ongoing foundational state of creative, spiritual 'readiness,' which could, at any given moment, erupt into a brief period of unity between said practitioner and a transcendental force (be that 'God,' some other conception of the divine, or the character being embodied by the actor).

The terms 'praying' and 'acting' are friendly and familiar to most, but this familiarity also makes them far too vague to productively compare. As such, they must be redefined as 'mystical practice' and 'embodying character.' Though more specific, both of these terms are less commonly known, and so require some explanation. Standing, then, as representatives of each of these terms are the mystics - John Cassian and Thomas Merton, and the actors - Konstantin Stanislavski and Michael Chekhov, through whom 'mystical practice' and 'embodying character' are each in turn specified, explored, and compared. Through this comparative framework, this essay contends that both disciplines are best understood not as singular 'actions' (to pray, to act) but as ongoing, intentional processes consisting of repetitive physical and mental exercises. Commitment to 'praying' and 'acting' as processes, then, leads the practitioner to develop an innate awareness of their ultimate reality and creative ability (understood as Merton's conception of 'Contemplation' and Stanislavski's 'Creative Mood'). This innate awareness pervades the practitioner's being and allows them to be 'lifted' (during prayer or performance) into a moment of ecstatic unity with a certain conception of a transcendent force (with the Christian God in Cassian's 'Fiery Prayer,' and the emergence of the 'Other I' for Chekhov).

Ultimately, this essay argues that acting (as embodiment) and praying (as mystical practice) are soil, tilled by the tools that are the codified exercises of acting methods and spiritual practices, in which seeds of curiosity and intention take root. One day, after much tending to, they sprout and bloom into gorgeous flowers of love for the world and intimate knowledge of reality.

This project is a formal attempt to illustrate a “politics of grief” – an ethical demand that emerges in loss. It is a series of essays, obituaries, and eulogies inspired by and indebted to Judith Butler's seminal essay “Violence, Mourning, Politics” (2003). Through theoretical reflections and critical engagements with various types of grief and loss, the project attempts to engage a praxis of mourning. The paper is written to be typeset like a page of Talmud, the central text of Rabbinic Judaism. This layout provokes a conversation across time and space, weaving the commentary of different authors with different perspectives around a central text. Writing in this form is an attempt to actualize certain claims: all writing is a collective process; all thinking is done in relation; my written words are a palimpsest of all I’ve read and learned. In this way the form serves the function, illustrating the importance of community and relationality in a politics of grief. Ultimately, I posit that using the obituary and eulogy as tools of mourning can support relational healing and furnish a sense of interdependence while tending individual wounds.

This file contains only an excerpt of the project, including the Table of Contents, Introduction and Bibliography. Please email rachelflorman@hds.harvard.edu if you would like to read more.

This paper examines the Apple Farm Community, a women’s commune founded in rural Michigan in the 1960s, through its fragmentary archival record and the first sustained scholarly engagement with its materials. It traces how community members turned to the unconscious as a generative site of knowledge, especially through dreamwork and ecological engagement. Dreams became the primary medium through which they understood inner and outer worlds as mutually constitutive, producing a relational field of meaning that linked psyche, body, and environment. The paper ultimately argues that Apple Farm expands understandings of gendered mediation and epistemologies of darkness in American women’s religious history.