Joseph J. Williams, SJ was born on December 1, 1875, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Nicholas and Mary Jane Williams. Williams attended Boston College High School, the College of St. Francis Xavier, Woodstock College, and Loyola School, New York and became a member of the Society of Jesus in 1895. In 1907 he was ordained.

In 1912 Williams traveled to Jamaica as a missionary. This appointment proved influential to him, as he became fascinated by anthropology and Jamaican and African folklore and cultural beliefs. He spent five years in the country, years which laid the groundwork for his future studies.

Williams returned to the United States in 1918, working at Woodstock College and College of the Holy Cross. In the 1920s and 1930s, he published a number of scholarly works concerning African and Caribbean history and belief systems, including Whisperings of the Caribbean (1925), Whence the Black Irish of Jamaica (1930), Hebrewisms of West Africa (1930), and Voodoo and Obeah in Jamaica (1932). In 1930, he launched a contest encouraging Jamaican school children to submit stories about the trickster character Anansi. In the early 1930s he became a lecturer in anthropology at Boston College.

Williams intended to travel to Africa to research his next project in the mid-1930s, but he became ill and spent the next few years bedridden, before dying on October 28, 1940 from a heart attack.

Sources

“Father Joseph J. Williams, 1875-1940,” Woodstock Letters, vol. 69 (1940).

McLaughlin, G. L., “Father Joseph John Williams (1875-1940), ‘Duppy Williams’,” (1993).