MISSOULA –

Josef Sorett, an interdisciplinary historian of religion in America, will present “Empire State of Mind: Civil Rights Politics in the Age of Black Presidents and Hip Hop Aesthetics” at The University of Montana on Thursday, Feb. 4.

The event, in commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, will take place from 7:30 to 9 p.m. in the North Underground Lecture Hall. It is free and open to the public.

A Boston native, Sorett received a doctorate from Harvard University, where he began in 2001 as a member of the first cohort of doctoral students in Harvard’s Department of African and African American Studies. He currently teaches at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University.

As part of his doctoral research, Sorett studied the significance of religion and spirituality in popular music and culture. He serves as an adviser to the African Hip Hop Research Project at Harvard University and is an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His writing has been published in The African American Pulpit, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and Pneuma, The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies.

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