Biography
Prince Acquah is a PhD student in the Department of Religion. His research lies at the intersection of postcolonial religious ethics, African Christianity, and queer theory, examining how colonial Christian moral formations continue to shape understandings of personhood, sexuality, and the sacred. His work investigates how African Christianity constructs the "dangerous body" as a site where communities perform salvation and negotiate moral formation. Focusing on institutions such as prayer camps and witch camps, he examines how ritualized practices of discipline and violence become religious technologies for producing moral subjects and regulating bodies deemed socially or spiritually threatening. His broader scholarship engages African politics of grievability, gender and sexuality, phenomenologies of the body and violence, and the ethical dimensions of African religious thought.
Before beginning his doctoral studies, Prince earned a Master of Arts in Religion and a Master of Sacred Theology from Union Theological Seminary, where he received the Christopher Morse Scholar Award for Outstanding Student in Theology. His theoretical work introduces the concept of diasporic spiritual liminality, a framework for understanding how coloniality fractures moral and spiritual wholeness, how African religious traditions endured and transformed across the Middle Passage and the African diaspora, and how healing can reclaim these ruptured spaces as sites of decolonial ethical imagination. The framework is developed in his forthcoming article in the Global Black Thought Journal (2027). He also received the Frederick Buechner Creative Writing Prize for his essay on African politics of grievability, published in The Buechner Annual Review. In recognition of his academic excellence and leadership, he was named a Point Scholar in both 2025 and 2026.