Dr. Julia Robinson Moore

Dr. Julia Robinson Moore

Associate Professor
Religious Studies

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 current research project, Remembered: Enslaved Burial Grounds and the Making of the City of Charlotte, speaks to the present-day realities of enslaved cemeteries around the city of Charlotte and their connection to American Presbyterianism. In keeping with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s strategic mission to serve as an urban research center that benefits the city of Charlotte, the Equity in Memory and Memorial Project was conceived as a community-engaged-component of Remembered.  Dr. Moore also has a third research project titled, Modern Lynchings: Mimetic Theory, Christianity, and Racial Violence in the New South, which 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 these intersections in order to unearth strategies of reparative justice, healing, and societal reform. My current research agenda speaks to the historical complexities of Black and White race relations in the city of city Charlotte through the lens of American Presbyterianism and the peace-building models of positive mimesis. Because peace-building through community-engaged-scholarship is at the heart of my research, the Equity in Memory and Memorial Project (E2M) was established 2021.  E2M was conceived as a bridge-builder between Charlotte communities that have been historically divided by race. Financial support of the E2M Project can be found here.

Read more about her research and publications here.