Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Corey D. B. Walker is Dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity, Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities, and Inaugural Director of the Program in African American Studies. He is the 2023-2024 Phi Beta Kappa Frank M. Updike Memorial Scholar.

He served as Vice President, Dean, and Professor of Religion and Society at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology at Virginia Union University; founding Dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, Business and Education and inaugural John W. and Anna Hodgin Hanes Professor of the Humanities at Winston-Salem State University; and Chair of the department of Africana Studies at Brown University, where he was also a tenured professor and faculty affiliate in the department of American Studies, department of Religious Studies, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, and Committee on Science and Technology Studies.

Dean Walker’s research, teaching, and public scholarship spans the areas of American and African American social and religious thought, ethics, and religion and American public life. He is author and editor of several books and has published over sixty articles, essays, and book chapters in a wide variety of scholarly journals and publications. He is currently completing his next book, Disciple of Nonviolence: Wyatt Tee Walker and the Struggle for the Soul of Democracy, to be published by the University of Virginia Press. Dean Walker also served as Book Review Editor and Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, generally considered the top academic journal in the field.

An ordained American Baptist clergyperson, Dean Walker speaks to congregations and communities across the nation and has appeared on a variety of media outlets in the United States and abroad.

Dr. Walker is the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar and will deliver the 2024 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture.