School of Social and Political Science

Background

I am an ethnographer interested in the performances of gender and race, and their co-imbrications. My work draws from Black studies, Caribbean theory and philosophy, and queer theory to trace the various ways we make, re-make, and can unmake ourselves. Aspects of this research have been published in Transforming Anthropology, Transgender Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Africana Religions, and in the edited volumes Religion in the Americas: Transcultural and Trans-hemispheric Approaches (University of New Mexico Press) and Latin American and US Latino Religions in North America (Bloomsbury Academic).

My current research project explores these themes through the costumes and personages that appear during las fiestas tradicionales en honor a Santiago Apóstol (las fiestas) in Loíza, Puerto Rico. In my ongoing fieldwork, I focus my attention on ritual cross-dressing and ritual abjection with one festival character in particular: la loca (the madwoman). "Loca" indexes a range of meanings beyond madwoman, including the presumably effeminate man and overly sexual woman. La loca is a bawdy and ribald personage that simultaneously entices and vexes festival goers through their flirtations and lewd gestures. Though I start with la loca within las fiestas, I also explore other manifestations of gendered madness to develop a theory of deliberate incongruity as a method of disruption and creation, which negotiate the histories of anti-blackness in Puerto Rico. This research forms the foundation for my first monograph, tentatively titled "Madness: Gender, Race, and Religion in Loíza, Puerto Rico." 

I am also part of the multidisciplinary research collaborative TERA Collective (Technology, Ecology, Religion, and Art) based at McGill University. This was a project started in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic that brought together artists and scholars to re-create and re-imagine North American naturalist societies's method of knowledge creation and curation. Together, we have published an autoethnographic critique and examination of archival methods and taxonomy in Holotipus and are currently working on an edited volume.

I completed my PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA), where I was a Teaching Fellow from 2019–2021. During that time, I was also an Adjunct Instructor at Elon University (USA). Prior to moving to Edinburgh, I was Lecturer in Social Anthropology at King's College London.