Julia Robinson

Julia Robinson Moore (Ph.D., Michigan State University) joined the Department of Religious Studies at UNC Charlotte in 2005. She teaches courses in African American religion, religions of the African Diaspora, and racial violence in America.  Her first book, Race, Religion, and the Pulpit: Reverend Robert L. Bradby and the Making of Urban Detroit (2015), explores how Second Baptist Church of Detroit’s nineteenth minister became the catalyst for economic empowerment, community-building, and the formation of an urban African American working class in Detroit. Her second book project, “Ties that Bind”: African American Presbyterians in the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New South, speaks to the historical complexities of black and white race relations in the cities of Charleston, Charlotte, and Savannah through the sacred context of the Presbyterian Church. Her third book project is titled Lynching Rituals: Anti-Black Violence Through the Lens of Mimetic Theory and seeks to situate race as a category of analysis within mimetic theory through the study of anti-black violence and terrorism in the New South.

Research Interests

Trained as a historian and religious studies scholar, my work focuses on the intersections of racism, religion, and racial violence within American Protestantism and the African Diaspora. I am committed to studying the ways in which religion has often been used to justify acts of racism, racial violence, and terrorism in order to unearth strategies for justice, healing, and societal reform.