Phone: (540) 568-6394

Fax: (540) 568-8072

Office: Cleveland Hall 112

Education:

Ph.D., Emory University, Graduate Division of Religion

Th.M., Emory University, Candler School of Theology

M.Div., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL)

B.A., Wheaton College (IL), Religious Education and Political Science

Research:

Dr. Aycock's research focuses on African Christianity during colonization as well as on African Diaspora Christianity in the twentieth century. She uses global approaches to the study of Christianity, engaging African studies, Black Atlantic studies, mission history and theology, and postcolonial theory. Her current research explores how African missionary consciousness emerges in Black Atlantic networks through the circulation of people and ideas, countering the destructions of colonial violence & racialization.  Her scholarship has been published in the Journal of Religious History, International Bulletin of Mission Research, & Theological Librarianship, and in the edited volume Protests, Petitions, and Persuasion: Documents from Malawi. She is also a recipient of a Research Fellowship from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.  Moreover, she has published articles and presented papers internationally.  She is an active member of the Zomba Theological University Research Seminar (Malawi) and has a standing appointment as Visiting Professor, Zomba Theological University, where she will take up residence for summer 2025. 

Teaching:

Dr. Aycock teaches courses in global Christianity, African Christianity, Black Atlantic religions, the Black Atlantic missionary movement, mission theory, theology, and history.  She is developing courses in African religions and African Philosophical Traditions in a Postcolonial Key. 

Her teaching most generally invites students to excavate their histories and relationship to religion as they develop frameworks for encountering and studying religious difference and plurality with rigor, curiosity, and delight.  Her teaching centers communities, narratives, and voices that have been treated as marginal, especially in the history of Christianity's global development, as a means to create an inclusive learning environment.  Her teaching is discussion-based, student-centered, and seeks to be contextually relevant to students' pressing questions and lived realities.

Prior to JMU, Dr. Aycock was Assistant Visiting Professor of History of Christianity at Hood Theological Seminary, the seminary of the A.M.E. Zion Church, "the Freedom Church" (NC).  She was also Affiliate Faculty in World Christianity at Columbia Theological Seminary (GA).