Kyama M. Mugambi is Associate Professor of World Christianity at Yale Divinity School. His scholarship examines the contemporary history of Christianity in Africa and how African Christians have shaped, and continue to reshape, global Christianity. He focuses on urban African Christianity, indigenous agency, mission, social transformation, communal life, and the oral liturgies and catechetical practices that sustain faith in the continent’s fast-growing cities.
His first book, A Spirit of Revitalization: Urban Pentecostalism in Kenya (Baylor University Press, 2020), traces the rise of Pentecostal movements in Nairobi and their role in renewing Kenyan Christianity. The International Bulletin of Missionary Research named it one of the ten outstanding books of 2020 in mission studies, World Christianity, and intercultural theology. It has been reviewed in the African Studies Review, the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, and the Journal of Religion in Africa. His second book, Christians in the City of Nairobi (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), co-authored with Mark Shaw, offers a historical portrait of Christian life in one of Africa’s major cities. He is now completing a third, Spirit, Worship and the Religious Imagination: Pentecostal Liturgies in Urban Africa.
His articles appear in Studies in World Christianity, Missiology, Church History, and Utambuzi. In “The Gospel beyond the West” (2023), he assesses the legacy of Lamin Sanneh and Andrew Walls and identifies new conversation partners for the field. His chapters appear in The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa, the Compact Atlas of Global Christianity, Pentecostal World, and Christianity and Empire Revisited. He is editor of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research and associate editor of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture.
His research has drawn significant support. From 2021 to 2024, he was principal investigator for a Nagel Institute grant studying alternative kinship structures in emerging African churches. That project has led to two co-edited volumes, both in progress. In 2023–24, he was a Whitney Fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center and Resident African Scholar at Oden House, Yale’s Center for Early African Christianity.
Building partnerships between Yale and Africa is central to his work. As faculty lead for the Project on Religion and Society in Africa at Yale’s MacMillan Center, he has organized public lectures, panels, and seminars that bring African scholars, policy experts, and civic leaders to Yale. With St. Paul’s University in Kenya, he co-organizes an annual public lecture and workshop for early-career researchers. Topics have ranged from religion and politics to ecology and artificial intelligence in theological education. He co-convenes the Yale-Edinburgh World Christianity conference, which he hosted at Yale in 2024. In 2022, he founded the conference’s first African hub in Nairobi. He has also led writing workshops for African researchers and worked with Yale Divinity School’s special collections to build ties with archives in Kenya.
Mugambi lectures widely across Africa, Europe, and North America. He has given invited lectures at Oxford, Cambridge, Boston University, the University of Michigan, and Princeton Theological Seminary. He has given plenary addresses at the Yale-Edinburgh conference, the American Society of Missions, and Baylor University’s Counting Evangelicals conference. He also delivered the Oden-Bediako-Walls Lecture at the Akrofi-Christaller Institute in Ghana.
He also brings his expertise to wider audiences. He has offered expert commentary on religion in Africa to CNN and spoken on Yale podcasts and the New Books Network. He directed Pastor, Mum (2026), a documentary on female pastors and spiritual kinship in Nairobi.
Before joining Yale in 2022, Mugambi taught at Pan African Christian University and was a senior researcher at the Centre for World Christianity at Africa International University, where he earned his PhD in 2017. He also served as editorial manager of the African Theological Network Press.
Link to CV
Link to Yale Divinity School Page
