Marina is a recent Master of Public Health graduate from the International Health & Development program at Tulane School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine who has returned to Tulane University in pursuit of a Master of Arts in Latin American Studies. She aims to build a more interdisciplinary approach to health inequities, complex social problems, and the decolonization of global health work.

She completed her undergraduate studies in public health and Spanish at the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO). As an undergraduate student, she engaged with local non-profits such as the YWCA of Oklahoma City and Infant Crisis Services. She also had the privilege of participating in numerous summer study trips and global health internships in Honduras, Spain, Panama, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Ecuador. The experiences she gained from working with community organizations and traveling abroad led her to Tulane University, where she would have the opportunity to study her interests from a global perspective.

Upon relocating to New Orleans, Marina began working with Sexual Trauma Awareness & Response (STAR), providing crisis intervention to survivors of sexual trauma, and NO/AIDS Task Force d.b.a. CrescentCare, assisting with the provision of community outreach services and the New Orleans Syringe Access Program. Her involvement with these organizations has inspired her to examine the relationship between sociopolitical factors, culture, and health equity. Currently, her research interests include community resilience in post-civil conflict areas, impact of out-migration on “left behind” communities, and indigenous resistance to neoliberal policies.

Susanne Hackett holds a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University and an MA in Latin American Studies (2012) from Tulane. Prior to joining the Stone Center, she worked for National Geographic Traveler Magazine for nine years, during which she studied and performed as a singer with an Afro-Cuban folkloric ensemble in Washington, D.C. At Tulane, her research has centered on Cuba, African Diaspora religions, music and dance, and visual language. Her Ph.D. dissertation, “The Yoruba in the Construction of Cuban Revolutionary Nationalism,” examines the role played by Afro-Cuban religious myths called patakíes in the Cuban imaginary, as expressed in literature, film, and popular culture, and argues for a re-centering and privileging of African-derived intellectual and philosophical frameworks within Cuban Revolutionary thought and discourse.

During her time at Tulane, Susanne worked as an assistant to Tulane’s Summer in Cuba program and as a tour guide both in Cuba and at the Whitney Plantation Museum in Louisiana. She also taught Latin American Studies and Spanish language at the undergraduate level.

A chapter of her dissertation was selected as the winner of the inaugural graduate student essay contest of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Latino/a Caucus, and will be published in the journal Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinema as an article titled “A Re-Visionist Her-Story of De Cierta Manera (1974): Reading Yoruba Myth in Sara Gómez’s Revolutionary Classic.”