FSU religion scholar awarded prestigious fellowship to Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music

A Florida State University religion scholar and cultural anthropologist has been appointed a fellow of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music (ISM), the premier center for the interdisciplinary study of sacred music, worship and the arts.

Joseph Hellweg, an associate professor in the Department of Religion, is one of 10 scholars who will spend the 2025-2026 academic year researching the history and culture of religions at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the first FSU faculty member to be awarded this prestigious fellowship.

Hellweg will pursue an interdisciplinary project on the songs of the late Dramane Coulibaly, a Muslim singer and healer for dozo hunters, a network of Indigenous hunters and healers from the Ivory Coast, located on the southern coast of West Africa. Coulibaly hosted Hellweg on multiple trips to the Ivory Coast to research dozo rituals since 1994.

“I’m thrilled to earn this fellowship and have the chance to spend a year writing and researching at Yale University,” Hellweg said. “As a fellow, I’ll be paired with a faculty member and maintain a regular presence at the Institute to learn about other fellows’ work and access Yale’s two archives on the Ivory Coast as well as other resources.”

ISM is a partnership between the Yale School of Music, Yale Divinity School and other academic and professional departments at Yale University. Fellows like Hellweg are selected based on their project’s adherence to ISM’s mission of building interdisciplinary bridges from the study and practice of religion to music and art through creative spaces and pursuits.

“Dramane was a renowned healer, skilled hunter and brilliant artist — he sang to calm the ‘shadows’ of deceased dozo hunters after their deaths, and dozos claimed that his songs enabled them to transition peacefully to the afterlife,” Hellweg said. “I interpret Dramane’s songs as reflections on ancient dozo texts that scholars have interpreted as alternative ‘oral’ sources of human rights. Rather than confine dozos’ voices to an ancient past, I want to engage them in the present.”

Hellweg will work alongside musicologists analyzing ritual music in different cultures, including those in Indigenous and Islamic contexts. This will allow him to approach the musical aspects of ancient dozo texts through new lenses of global reception, consumption, nationalism and more.

“I was initially drawn to dozo hunters because of their music and dance performances, but then became interested in the unfolding dynamics of their unofficial security movement and involvement in the Ivory Coast’s rebellion from 2002 until 2011,” Hellweg said. “The manuscript I’ll write at Yale will invite ethicists and human rights scholars to engage Dramane’s songs as meaningful expressions that go beyond the seemingly traditional view that oral arts lack sophistication or value. Through this work, I aim to highlight the contributions of formerly colonized people to human rights policymaking.”

In his manuscript, Hellweg will analyze how Coulibaly’s contemporary songs and the dances they’ve inspired — including the important role that dancing plays at dozo funerals — express human knowledge, skills and freedoms from a wider perspective of human rights.

“I’m thrilled that the ISM has acknowledged the cutting-edge nature of Joseph’s research,” said Martin Kavka, department chair and professor of religion at FSU. “In the study of religion, we aren’t necessarily attuned to how song — and especially song as a means of communing with the spirits of the dead — can express an ethical stance. Joseph’s research helps us attune to that by showing us the dozos as they are in themselves and not as they’re figuratively imagined in a scholar’s head.”

Hellweg joined FSU’s faculty in 2003 and teaches classes on African studies, anthropology and culture, including public health and religions in Africa, through the Department of Religion. His previous work includes three books on religion, politics and anthropology in Africa in addition to publications in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the journal Africa, the African Studies Review, Africa Today, Afrique contemporaine, the Journal of Africana Religions, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and several edited collections.

Hellweg serves as deputy editor for the Journal of Religion in Africa and is a past president of the Mande Studies Association and co-editor-in-chief of its journal, Mande Studies.

“Returning to Dramane’s songs after publishing two articles on his work over the past six years has allowed me to enrich my approach to my own work as a whole,” Hellweg said. “My research challenges me to rearrange the way I think and feel, to extend my perspectives and better understand and empathize with my hosts in West Africa in order to exchange ideas and experiences with them so that we can enrich each other’s lives.”

For more information about research conducted in FSU’s Department of Religion, visit religion.fsu.edu.