Annie Gibson

My research explores how performance becomes a staging ground to construct a sense of group cohesion across cultures, distances, and geographic imaginaries. While my earlier scholarly research focused on the New Orleans’ Latin American community as a point of departure, my current scholarly research embarks on an exploration of issues of belonging, identity, and intercultural performance in the context of global exchanges in the field of higher education as well as in Brazilian peripheral communities.

My first book, Post-Katrina Brazucas: Brazilians in New Orleans (UNO Press: 2012), cut across disciplinary methodologies by using the lenses of literary and cultural studies, performance, dance, and ethnography to approach my research subject of migration. I engaged with contemporary cultural theory related to the construction of hybrid identities through migration and literary theory surrounding the discourses of testimonio fiction. This research also became the subject of a subsequent book chapter concerning artistic performances by Brazilian immigrants in New Orleans in Performing Brazil edited by Kathryn Sanchez and Severino Albuquerque.

My second book, Hispanic and Latino New Orleans: Immigration and Identity since the 18th Century (co-authored, LSU Press: 2015), is marked by my sense of activism and active involvement in the local Latin American community in New Orleans. I was awarded the Cervantes Award in 2016 for my contribution to the local Hispanic American Arts Foundation of New Orleans and the book was awarded the J.B Jackson book prize for contribution of the year to the historical and ethnic geography of the United States by the Association of American Geographers in 2015. This research inserts itself in the escalating debates about immigration, informing theories of assimilation, social capital accumulation, and identity formation. It provides the first study of how diverse Hispanic and Latino communities have helped to create the Crescent City as a distinctive US place over several centuries, with an emphasis on the period leading up to Katrina to the present.

Currently, my research has moved towards immigrant communities in the peripheral communities of São Paulo where, in the last decade, beginning in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, literary saraus (soirees) have become spaces that reconceptualize public relationships to literature. I am particularly interested in the body as a component of the literary text offering visual, auditory, and kinesthetic knowledge

Finally, my administrative responsibilities at Tulane have instilled an interest in researching interdisciplinary approaches to methodology that link critical studies of immigration to student mobility in study abroad through intercultural development theories, performance, film, literature, and popular music analysis. The impact of how external factors such as class size; study abroad program model; level of immersion; living situation (with locals, U.S. Americans or international students); second language acquisition; areas of study (major/minor); the extent to which students travel; and the occurrence of traumatic events affect students’ intercultural growth and development are covered in my current research in the field of international education.