Joseph R. Winters is Alexander F. Hehmeyer Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African and African American Studies with secondary positions in English and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. His research resides at the intersection of black religious thought, black literature, and critical theory. More specifically, he explores how black studies (literature, aesthetics, critical thought) has always been invested to varying degrees, in deconstructing and re-imagining the sacred, religiosity, and spirit. His first book, Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (Duke Press, 2016), examines how black literary figures contest linear, ascendant notions of time and put forth conceptions of hope and possibility that are informed by loss, violence, and a stubborn sense of the tragic. He is currently working on a manuscript, Disturbing Profanity: Hip Hop, Blackness, and the Volatile Sacred, under contract with Duke University Press.