Vanessa Castañeda is the James B. Duke Assistant Professor of Afro-Latin American Studies at Davidson College, where she teaches and conducts community-engaged research at the intersections of race, gender, food, culture, and political economy in Latin America and the African diaspora. She completed her PhD in Latin American Studies from Tulane University, where she was trained as an anthropologist and Latin Americanist.

Decades of economic globalization have transformed states and social relations, fueling inequality and exclusionary politics around the world.

The Stone Center is excited to offer this opportunity to participate in a professional development workshop on Op-Ed research and writing on Inter-American Relations.

Join us for an interview and book signing with Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza, 2024 Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice. 

Join us for a lecture by Patrícia Mourão de Andrade, Postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Arts of the State University of Campinas, Brazil, and Visiting Scholar in the Film and Media Cultures Program at the Graduate Center at CUNY.

This talk revisits the opening chapter of Spirals in the Caribbean (2024), focusing on El Comegente, a recurring figure of racialized monstrosity that emerged in 1791 Santo Domingo amid local Black rebellions and neighboring French Saint-Domingue insurrections. Initially mobilized to justify repression, El Comegente later became a folk figure, recycled in late 19th- and 20th-century Dominican fiction and national narratives, and haunting today’s collective memories.