Dr. Akissi Britton is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University,New Brunswick.

She is an expert on African Diasporic religions, with a focus on Lucumí/Santería/Orisa traditions. Her work explores the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and religion, as well as Black digital studies, Black feminisms, Black Atlantic/African Diaspora theory, and the impact of gentrification on diasporic religious communities. She is currently working on her first book manuscript, under contract with NYU Press, tentatively titled The Children of Cotton: African American Lucumí Finding and Losing Home in Diaspora. The book examines an African American community of Lucumí practitioners, their engagements with other Orisa practitioners throughout the African Diaspora, and the role of race, ethnicity, and gender in these interactions.

Dr. Britton employs both traditional and digital ethnographic methods (including social media) to examine how Orisa practitioners navigate difference, dissent, and debate in building religious communities both online and offline.