Charrise Barron

On leave 2026-2027

Charrise Barron is an ethnomusicologist and scholar of African American music and religion. A faculty member in Harvard’s Department of Music, she is also affiliated with the Department of African and African American Studies and the Harvard Data Science Initiative. Her work examines black sacred music, African American Christianity, and black popular music and culture more broadly. Her latest book, The Platinum Age of Gospel: The Years When Crossover Music Changed Everything (Harvard University Press, 2026), traces the aesthetic, cultural, theological, and institutional shifts that have shaped gospel music over the past three decades.

Barron holds a Ph.D. in African and African American Studies from Harvard University, with specializations in religion and ethnomusicology, and a Master of Divinity, summa cum laude, from Yale Divinity School, where she also earned a certificate from the Institute of Sacred Music (ISM). She is an alumna of the Forum for Theological Exploration (FTE) Doctoral Fellowship and a member of Harvard’s Society of Horizons Scholars.

Barron joined Harvard’s faculty in 2022 while also serving as a 2022–2023 Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Butler School of Music. She previously taught at Brown University (2018–2022), where she co-founded the Black Music Lab (formerly the Black Music Studies Initiative); at Yale (2017–2018) as an ISM Postdoctoral Fellow; and at Colorado College (2016–2017) as a Riley Scholar-in-Residence.

A composer and lyricist, Barron wrote the music and lyrics for The Lawsons: A Civil Rights Love Story (Ensemble Theatre, Houston, 2022), a commissioned play celebrating the shared legacy and love story of William “Bill” Lawson, civil rights activist and founding pastor of Houston’s historic Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, and his wife Audrey Lawson.

Barron’s recent scholarly publications include “Playing Church: Tyler Perry’s Stage Play as Pulpit and Choir Stand” (forthcoming) in the journal Black Sacred Music; “Bridging Liturgies in the Black Lives Matter Era” (2020) in the journal Liturgy; and “Between Free Grace and Liberty: Richard Allen’s Evocations of Eschatological and Immediate Freedom” (2021) in the book Theology, Music, and Modernity: Struggles for Freedom.