Bertin M. Louis, Jr.

Bertin M. Louis, Jr. PhD is Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American & Africana Studies (AAAS) at the University of Kentucky. He is the winner of the 2023 Sam Dubal Memorial Award for Anti-Colonialism and Racial Justice in Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Louis is also the winner of the 2023-2024 Wenner-Gren Fellowship in Anthropology and Black Experiences (School for Advanced Research).

Bertin served as President of the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA - a section of the AAA [2021-2023]), is the current ABA Secretary/Treasurer (2023-2025), a past Editor of Inside Higher Ed’s Conditionally Accepted column, a regular contributor to Higher Ed Jobs, and a co-editor for the Truthout series called “Challenging the Corporate University.” Louis is also the co-author of the forthcoming Conditionally Accepted: Navigating Higher Education from the Margins (University of Texas Press, 2024).

Dr. Louis served as the inaugural director of undergraduate studies for AAAS (2019-2021) at the University of Kentucky and Vice Chair of the Africana Studies Program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2014-2019). Dr. Louis studies the growth of Protestant forms of Christianity among Haitians transnationally, which is featured in his New York University Press book, “My Soul is in Haiti: Protestantism in the Haitian Diaspora of the Bahamas (2015)” which was a Finalist for the 2015 Haitian Studies Association Book Prize in the Social Sciences. He also studies human rights, statelessness among Haitians in the Bahamas, anti-Haitianism, and antiracist social movements in the US South. Dr. Louis teaches courses in Black Studies and Cultural Anthropology, and he received his PhD in 2008 from the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in Saint Louis. 

Dr. Louis is also the owner and founder of Navigating Higher Education (NHE), an award-winning academic consulting firm which offers higher education-related services and empowers its clients to find and secure academic positions.

Throughout his career, Bertin M. Louis Jr. challenges those who engage his work to stretch their moral, political, and ethical imagination beyond simplistic distinctions between “victims, perpetrators, and saviors” (cf. Makau Mutua) that often reside underneath mainstream narratives about social justice and human rights. With his work on evangelical Protestantism in the Haitian diaspora in the Bahamas and elsewhere, Dr. Louis has contributed greatly to understanding how religious movements articulate with political and economic trends such as the rise of neoliberalism, the emergence of racial-capitalist, and anti-Black political formations in the Caribbean in the wake of decolonization, and the failures of international organizations to guarantee the human rights of stateless people.