About
About
Aaron M. Treadwell is a historian of African American religion and political theology whose scholarship examines how Black religious institutions navigated racial caste violence in the long nineteenth-century United States. His work centers on the relationship between theology, institutional strategy, and resistance—particularly the ways African American clergy and congregations interpreted, absorbed, and confronted extralegal violence during the post-Reconstruction era.
His first book, Tongues of Fire: A Collection of the Black Religious Resistance Against Lynching, published by Louisiana State University Press in 2025, reinterprets the Black pulpit as a site of theological protection and political formation in the age of lynching. Rather than treating ministers solely as moral witnesses, the book argues that African American clergy developed layered strategies—liturgical, rhetorical, and institutional—to safeguard their communities amid racial terror. His second monograph, Black Christian Evolution: The Gospel of the Northern Negro in the Southern Mission, forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in 2027, traces the theological and institutional transformation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church during its southern expansion, situating denominational growth within broader debates about respectability, nationalism, and Black spiritual self-determination.
Treadwell’s peer-reviewed scholarship has appeared in leading journals of African American history and religious studies. Across articles and book chapters, he engages historiographies of racial violence, Black religious thought, and African diasporic institutional history. His work explores the intersections of liberation theology, public theology, and institutional survival, asking how Black religious actors translated belief into structural response.
In addition to his monographs, he has contributed chapters to edited volumes published by the University of Wisconsin Press, Equinox Publishing, and Peter Lang. These essays address subjects including voter suppression in contemporary U.S. politics, racialized violence against Black women, and the relationship between radical theology and social upheaval in the American South. Throughout his scholarship, Treadwell bridges intellectual history and lived religion, foregrounding the archive as both method and ethical terrain.
He is the founder and director of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Digital Archives, a grant-funded public history initiative supported by the Louisville Institute. The project advances archival preservation, digital access, and denominational historiography, expanding scholarly and community engagement with AME institutional history. His archival training includes professional experience at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., an experience that continues to shape both his research practice and his commitment to documentary preservation.
Treadwell serves on the editorial board of Methodist History and regularly presents his research at national meetings of the American Historical Association, the American Academy of Religion, and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
He is Associate Professor of History and Director of Africana Studies at Middle Tennessee State University, where he teaches courses in African American history, African diasporic religions, and historical research methods. His teaching emphasizes historiography as argument, archival literacy, and the disciplined construction of evidence-based interpretation.
He received his Ph.D. in History from Howard University, with concentrations in nineteenth-century African American religious history, African diaspora studies, and public history.