Scholarship and Biography
At the heart of my research and teaching interests are transnational circuits of material and symbolic mediations across the Iberian Atlantic. My current book project, Encounters between Eshu and Dionysus: Afro-Greek Mediations in Cuba and Brazil, investigates the intersections of ancient Greek and African cosmogonies in Cuban and Brazilian cultures. By examining the Africanization of three dominant mythical figures (Dionysius, Orpheus, and Medea), the project reconstructs unexplored processes of transculturation in Latin America and illuminates uncharted Afrodiasporic repertoires from the 1940s to the present. I challenge traditional associations in academia between the classics and whiteness and explore the destabilizing junctures at which ancient Greek traditions encounter syncretic religions, such as Candomblé, Santería, Espiritismo, and Palo Monte. Drawing on multiple sources (ethnographic texts, plays, films, dances), I discuss the media technologies, performance practices, and artifacts involved in these African and Greek intersections and their symbolic and material repercussions for questions of identity, race, gender, religion, and human agency.