Olupona is a scholar of indigenous African religions who came to Harvard after serving as a professor at the
University of California, Davis. He is working on a study of the religious practices of the estimated one million
Africans who have emigrated to the
United States over the last 40 years, examining in particular several populations that remain relatively invisible in the American religious landscape: "reverse missionaries" who have come to the U.S. to establish churches, African
Pentecostals in American congregations, American branches of independent
African churches, and indigenous African religious communities in the U.S. His earlier research includes African
spirituality and ritual practices,
spirit possession,
Pentecostalism,
Yoruba festivals, animal symbolism, icons,
phenomenology, and
religious pluralism in
Africa and the
Americas. In his forthcoming book Ile-Ife: The City of 201 Gods, he examines the modern urban mixing of ritual,
royalty,
gender, class, and power, and how the structure, content, and meaning of religious beliefs and practices permeate daily life. He has authored or edited seven other books, including Kingship, Religion, and Rituals in a Nigerian Community: A Phenomenological Study of Ondo Yoruba Festivals, which has been used for ethnographic research among Yoruba-speaking communities. Olupona has received grants from the
Guggenheim Foundation, the
American Philosophical Society, the
Ford Foundation, the Davis Humanities Institute, the
Rockefeller Foundation, the
Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the
Getty Foundation. He also founded the IIAS in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. He has served on the editorial boards of three journals and as president of the African Association for the Study of Religion. In 2000, Olupona received an honorary doctorate in divinity from the
University of Edinburgh in
Scotland. ==Early life and education==