Activities & Initiatives
Caribbean Initiative Summer Research Awards, 2025
The following students were recipients of summer 2025 research awards to conduct research in Caribbean Studies.
Amarilys Sánchez, PhD student, Department of History — "Moving Sugar: Black Puerto Rican Workers and Imperial Borderland Networks, 1910s–1930s," Puerto Rico
Maysa Martins, PhD student, Department of Art and Art History — "Black Prophets: The Material and Spiritual Archives of the Black Atlantic in the works of Arthur Bispo do Rosário," Jamaica
Nelson Pagán-Butler, PhD student, Department of Spanish & Portuguese — "Undoing the Canon: Hugo Tolentino Dipp, Afro-Dominicanidad, and Intellectual History," Dominican Republic
Journalist Abby Phillip delivered the 2025 Eric Williams Memorial Lecture, co-sponsored by the LLILAS Caribbean Studies Initiative
Caribbean Studies Events, 2024–25
The following faculty members received funding to organize events that raise the visibility of Caribbean studies on campus.
Professor Robin Moore, Butler School of Music — Lecture by Dr. Jessica Swanston Baker, Ethnomusicologist, University of Chicago: "Island Time: Speed and the Archipelago from St. Kitts and Nevis"
Professor César A. Salgado, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Lauren Peña, PhD, Benson Latin American Collection — Film screening and discussion feature Lester Hamlet and Luis Alberto García, Ya no es antes
Professor Amy Thompson, Department of Geography and the Environment — Lecture by Jessica Thompson Jobe, PhD, U.S. Geological Survey, "Earthquakes, Faults, and Seismic Hazard in Puerto Rico"
Professor Jennifer Wilks, Departments of English and African & African Diaspora Studies — 2025 Eric Williams Memorial Lecture by Abby Phillip, "Journalism in Challenging Times"
Previous Student Awardees for Summer Research
- Kathleen Field, Spanish and Portuguese, 2024
Archival research on the creation of the Haitian police force and its deployment to enforce extractive practices over the course of the twentieth century.
- Sewon Ohr, Geography and the Environment, 2024
His research seeks to unravel the intricate relationships between vegetation and hydrogeomorphic factors in Puerto Rican lacustrine ecosystems such as the Rio Yauco and Rio Caonillas watersheds.
- Clifton E. Sorrell, Department of History, 2024
His dissertation project situates early Jamaica as an Imperial frontier and borderland to study the participation of African and Afro-descendant communities in the making of the early-modern trans-imperial Caribbean.
- Diego de Jesus, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, 2024
Ethnographic research in Black communities on Tierra Bomba Island, situated off the coast of Cartagena in the Colombian Caribbean. Fieldwork seeks to understand how these communities are addressing climate-related challenges and organizing for COP 30, a crucial global event on climate change, scheduled for November 2025 in Pará, Brazil.
- Peyton E. White, Department of Religious Studies, 2024
This research seeks to better understand which Rastafarian theologies, aesthetics, material products, and ideologies are exhibited and utilized within tourist attractions and to what ends. The project will investigate a wide variety of Montego Bay Rastafarian-branded commercialized spaces which explicitly cater to tourists or otherwise seek a tourist audience.
- Mariana Escalona, LLILAS, 2023
Research addresses key questions on the reconstruction of the narrative about the life of enslaved African women in the Antillean Caribbean during the colonial period.
- Katherine A. Pérez-Quiñones, Community and Regional Planning, 2023
Researches historically marginalized coastal communities and the contradictory issues they face: the increasing vulnerability to extreme weather events, the threat of displacement anddevelopment for profit, and the desire to stay.
- Francis Russell, Department of Geography and the Environment, 2023
Research focuses on the vulnerability and resilience of coffee farmers in Puerto Rico to economic and environmental shocks.
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- Nicole Smythe-Johnson, Department of Art and Art History, 2023
Dissertation research for “In Pursuit of a Subaltern Modernism: The Life and Work of John Dunkley.”
- Pedro Valdez-Castro, LLILAS, 2023
Conducted a research project on the cultural, symbolic, and emotional dimensions of Afro-Caribbean migration to the U.S.–Mexico border.
- Piero Visconte, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, 2023
His dissertation, ”Aspects of Afro-Puerto Rican Spanish: The Interplay of Social and Linguistic Factors,” combines linguistic, sociohistorical, legal, and anthropological insights to cast light on the nature and origins of Afro–Puerto Rican Spanish, a vernacular that developed in colonial Puerto Rico from the contact of African languages and Spanish.
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2023–2024 Events
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Geography Colloquium with Professors Hadiya Sewer and Crystal Fortwangler
November 10, 2023, 4 p.m., RLP 0.128
Co-sponsored by the Caribbean Studies Initiative and the Department of Geography and the Environment, this event featured a screening of the short film Our Islands, Our Home (2019) as well as preview segments of the forthcoming documentary Reclaiming Our Island plus a Q & A. The films document how the insights of Senator Theovald Moorehead (U.S. Virgin Islands) inspired his daughter, Theodora Moorehead and other local activists in demanding a more just use of the Virgin Island's resources.
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Workshop: Dr. Nadia Mosquera in Conversation with Dr. Deborah Thomas
October 6, 2023, 10 a.m., BUR 554
Deborah Thomas, PhD, Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, and Nadia Mosquera Muriel, PhD (Early Career Provost Fellow, UT Austin)
Dr. Mosquera presented a paper examining the entanglement of Blackness, ideas of skin color and racial identity, and the questioning of religious and Afro-Catholic cultural expressions among Afro-Latin American populations. Based on 13 months of ethnographic research in Venezuela's central coast, Mosquera's work examines Afro-Venezuelan festivals organized around the figures of patron saints such as San Juan Bautista, San Benito de Palermo, and San Juan Congo as sites that reveal how Afro-Venezuelan cultural and political activists question the ideological fiction of racial democracy in Venezuela. She argues that practices of refusal and interrogation of colonial legacies attributed to religious iconography in Venezuela channel fresh cultural contestations against white supremacy embedded in the narrative of racial mixture, or mestizaje, in Latin America. Against ideas of “syncretism,” Mosquera proposes a paradigm of “parallelism” to understand Afro-Venezuelan religious politics in Venezuela.
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Lecture: Surrender: The Death of the West, Caribbean World-Building, and the Future of Us All
October 6, 2023, 2:30 p.m., RLP 1.302B
The LLILAS Caribbean Studies Initiative presents a public lecture by Deborah Thomas, PhD, Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.
How can one imagine sovereignty in a context in which the specter of Black death on the plantation remains an ordinary parameter for organizing social and economic value? How can one enact self-determination when new forms of dispossession are continuously rewritten over earlier removals and displacements? These questions suffuse our engagements with notions of freedom, liberation, and justice, and seem to negate the possibility of sovereignty in Black life, insofar as sovereignty remains tethered to the state, or to the parameters of its institutions.
In this talk, Thomas argues that reaching toward a sovereignty “otherwise” requires that we plumb other terms that might afford a clearer articulation of the histories and futures of (in this case) Caribbean freedom. She posits “possession” as a kind of companion term to sovereignty, one that both aligns with and disrupts imperialist and nationalist aspirations, and one that will ultimately lead us to another term, “surrender,” which can attune us to relations of repetition, recovery, return, and repair.