Caribbean Studies Initiative
"Dessalines Ripping the White from the Flag," 1995, by Madsen Mompremier (b. 1952, Gonaïves, Haiti). Fowler Museum at UCLA.
The Caribbean Studies Initiative provides a space to connect and showcase UT Austin's strong multidisciplinary cohort of faculty and grad students working on the Greater Caribbean and its diasporas. Including the multilingual coastal regions of Central America, multiregional Black Atlantic connectivity, the Gulf of Mexico Coast, Venezuela, the Caribbean coast of Colombia, and centers of large-scale Caribbean migration in Europe, the US, and Canada, the Greater Caribbean reflects the longstanding global and diverse orientations of the region.
Scroll down to view lists of UT Caribbeanist faculty and graduate students.
Image credit (bottom): "Looking South – Zaza," by Olivia Fern (Trinidad), used with permission.
Steering Committee
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Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Interests: African diaspora religions; the intersections of religion, race, gender and sexual alterity, criminality, material culture, sensory epistemolgies, and social media practices among African diasporic religious practitioners in the Caribbean, Latin America and North America
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Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Interests: Contestations over the limits of legal power, science, race, and religion in the Americas; Caribbean spiritual practices; climate change, religion, and conceptions of energy in the southern Caribbean (Trinidad, Venezuela, and Guyana)
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Associate Professor, LLILAS and Department of Geography & the Environment
Interests: Watershed sciences and applied hydrology and geomorphology of the Insular Caribbean and Latin America; human modification of landscapes; degradation of coral reefs; geomorphic impacts of tropical cyclones; environmental histories of colonial and post-colonial landscapes in the Caribbean
- Caribbeanist Faculty
Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez, Spanish & Portuguese | Interests: African Diaspora, blackness, gender, sexuality, queerness, racialization, media studies
Khytie K. Brown, Religious Studies | Interests: African diaspora religions, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, Caribbean religions
Simone Browne, African & African Diaspora Studies | Interests: Surveillance, more recently environment
Danielle Clealand, Mexican American & Latino Studies | Interests: Racial politics, Afro-Latino politics and identity
Brent Crosson, Religious Studies | Interests: Religion, secularism, climate change, race, science studies
Lina Del Castillo, History / LLILAS | Interests: Age of revolution, abolition/emancipation/slavery, print culture, visual culture, history of science
Lyndon K. Gill, African and African Diaspora Studies | Interests: Queer aesthetics in the African Diaspora, LGBT art and activism in Caribbean cultures, African-based spiritual traditions in the Americas
Mónica A. Jiménez, African & African Diaspora Studies | Interests: Race, law, empire, nationalism, revolution
Robin Moore, Butler School of Music | Interests: Music and other expressive culture, Afrodiasporic religions, political song
Megan Raby, History | Interests: History of science, environmental history
Carlos Ramos-Scharrón, Geography & the Environment / LLILAS | Interests: Environment, climate change, hydormorphology, disasters
César A. Salgado, Spanish & Portuguese | Interests: Cuban literature
Bjørn Sletto, Architecture (Planning) | Interests: Urban planning, community development
Cristina Soriano, History | Interests: Venezuela, Trinidad, early colonial history
Ashley Coleman Taylor, Religious Studies / Women's & Gender Studies | Interests: Black feminism, ethnography, gender and sexuality
Jennifer Wilks, English / African & African Diaspora Studies | Interests: Gender, literary and cultural studies
- Caribbeanist Graduate Students
Chasitie Brown, Art & Art History | Interests: Race, gender, visual arts, affect/phenomenology, afterlives/hauntings of slavery
Wilfredo Burgos Matos, Spanish & Portuguese | Interests: Sound studies and the relationship to racial discourses of Dominicanness
Mariana Escalona, LLILAS | Interests: Gender, race, laws of the colonial period
Jade Evans, Religious Studies | Interests: Race, religion, and discourse
Odalis García Gorra, American Studies | Interests: Digital studies, spirituality, culture, commercialism
Victoria Mogollón, Ethnomusicology | Interests: Religion, music
Keturah Nichols, Spanish & Portuguese | Interests: Afrolatinidades, race, gender, migration, mourning
Nelson Pagan-Butler, Spanish & Portuguese | Interests: Race and intellectual history
Isaiah Rivera, African & African Diaspora Studies | Interests: Sexuality, gender, antiblackness, racial formations, (digital) media
Nicole Smythe-Johnson, Art & Art History | Interests: Emodernism, early 20th-C. circum-Caribbean migratory sphere, self-taught artists, cultural policy, "banana republics"
Clifton Sorrell III, History | Interests: Jamaica, maroonage, early colonial history
Piero Visconte, Spanish & Portuguese | Interests: Sociolinguistics, pidgins and creoles, Afro-Latino populations
Peyton E. White, Religious Studies | Interests: Rastafari, Pan-Africanism, Jamaica
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Learn more
Check the LLILAS Events page for upcoming public programs of interest, or sign up for the LLILAS Benson e-newsletter.
Follow LLILAS on Social Media: The LLILAS pages on Facebook and Instagram share frequent updates on LLILAS events, faculty and student research, and relevant stories about Latin America and the Caribbean.
