Hartford, Conn –  At the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association on December 1, Trinity College Professor Leslie Desmangles was honored with a double panel sponsored by the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness: Caribbean Religions and their Interpenetration/Creolization/Symbiosis: Papers in honor of Leslie G. Desmangles.

Organized by Professor Elizabeth McAlister of Wesleyan University and Professor Steven Glazier of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the panel featured papers by nine scholars that ranged in subject matter from Haitian Vodou and Brazilian Candomblé, to Cuban Santería and Puerto Rican witchcraft. 

Desmangles was one of many Temple University Department of Religion (TUDOR) alums, which included Professor Joseph Murphy of Georgetown University, a leading expert on Santería, who served as a respondent, and Terry Rey, Associate Professor of Religion at Temple University who co-presented with Karen Richman of the University of Notre Dame, a paper on Central African influences in Haitian Vodou and Catholicism.  Temple anthropology professor Raquel Romberg was also among the presenters.

One of the first students to work under groundbreaking TUDOR scholar of Caribbean religions Dr. Leonard Barrett (The Rastafarians, Soul Force, The Sun and the Drum), in 1975 Desmangles defended his dissertation on notions of God in Haitian Vodou. He would later publish his award-winning and influential book, The Faces of the God: Vodou and Roman
Catholicism in Haiti, as well as numerous articles and book chapters, and become a mentor to many scholars of Caribbean religions.

The list of TUDOR Ph.D.s in the subfield of Caribbean religious studies includes Desmangles, Karen McCarthy Brown, Murphy, Ina Fandrich, Rey, Edwin Aponte, and Miguel De La Torre.

“Desmangles is one of the kindest and most gracious people in our field and a generous mentor to many of my generation of scholars of African diasporic religions. We at TUDOR should all take great pride in Desmangles's life and work, and earnestly endeavor to carry on the rich legacy in the study of Caribbean religions here that he was so instrumental in establishing,” Rey said.

Professor Desmangles graduated from Eastern University in 1964 with a B.A. in Music, from Palmer Seminary in Philadelphia with an M. Div. in Theology, and from Temple University in 1975 with a Ph.D. in Anthropology of Religion, specializing in Caribbean and African Studies. He taught at Ohio Wesleyan University from 1969-1976, at De Paul University from 1976-1978, and has been at Trinity since 1978.