My work considers site, space, landscape, and the politics of embodiment in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on Brazil and the United States. My first book project, Spatial Orders, Social Forms, analyzes the aesthetics of space in projects by Brazilian artists, architects, city planners, and politicians from the late 1920s through 1960s. This book touches on key moments in art and architectural history of Brazil, including social control and 1920s-30s urbanization projects, the Ministry of Education building in Rio de Janeiro, the founding of new modern art museums in Brazilian cities of the 1940s and 1950s, theories of the Concrete/Neoconcrete, and the role of race in performance by 1960s avant-garde. The book situates works of Brazilian art and architecture in longer histories of urban space from the colonial era to the 20th century, and poses questions about the phenomenology of political collectivity.

My ongoing research projects include a book on the spatialization of race in Louisiana coastal and riparian landscapes in the context of competing imperialisms (French, Spanish, British, U.S.), and a co-edited volume on mobile and temporary architectures in colonial and imperial contexts. I have also written essays on the site specificity of contemporary participatory art such as Dread Scott’s Slave Rebellion Reenactment (2019); approaches to understanding the architectural settings of works looted from West Africa; expanded conceptions of “American” art with attention to Indigenous archaeology; the temporality of architectures intended for migrants and refugees; DIY environmental design in micro-businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic; European museum collecting practices and ideas of “non-western art”; and the roles of Afro-brasilidade and Indigenismo for the pau-brasil and antropofagia aesthetic movements.

Ecuadorian writer Gabriela Alemán is one of the premier voices in Latin American Literature today. Best known for her fiction, she has published 9 collections of short stories, 3 novels, 1 play, and 1 essay collection. Her most recent releases are the English translation of her 2007 novel Poso Wells and the Spanish-language novel Humo, which won the Premio Joaquín Gallegos Lara for fiction in Ecuador in 2017. The exceptional creativity of Alemán’s writing has garnered her international acclaim, including a Guggenheim fellowship and a place among the Bogotá39, the 2007 Hay Festivals list of the best 39 Latin American writers under the age of 39. In addition to her writing, Alemán has worked as a journalist, editor, researcher and translator, and has played professional women's basketball. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Studies from Cambridge University, a Masters in Latin American Literature from the Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar, and a Ph.D. in Film Studies from Tulane, where her dissertation was supervised by Dr. Ana López. Now on the faculty of Universidad de San Francisco in Quito, she was a Greenleaf Scholar in Residence in the spring of 2019 at the Stone Center and returns this fall to continue the Latin American Writers Series at Tulane.

I am a historian of comparative black experience around the Americas, with particular interest in the different ways that black cultures developed during the years of slavery between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of my research has focused geographically in the Caribbean basin and chronologically in the nineteenth century, during the era of slave emancipation.

My 2006 book, “New Negroes from Africa”: Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean (Indiana University Press) explored how Africans rescued from illegally-operating slave ships by the British navy developed quite different communities and cultural practices depending on the specific places they settled around the Caribbean basin. This project originated as an attempt to explore how Africans who arrived in the Americas without the particular constraints of chattel slavery might have created community in ways both similar to and different from the majority of Africans who entered the Americas through systems of presumably permanent slavery. The book paid some particular attention to the impact of specific African cultural, geographic and political origins on the way that these people rescued from Atlantic slave trade built their new Caribbean lives. The administrative work done by colonial and local authorities around the suppression of the slave trade generated some peculiarly rich written records related to the actual journeys of slave ships; and in many cases even the life trajectories of their thousands of African captives. Such records have made these 250,000 lives more knowable—or knowable in different ways—than most of the 12 million Africans transported on Atlantic slave ships between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

While multiple European governments and the United States engaged in slave trade suppression, the most significant international anti-slave-trade campaign involved British naval policing of slave ships attempting to supply the nineteenth-century agricultural economies of Cuba and Brazil. British authorities most often described the people rescued from Atlantic slave ships as “liberated Africans” in part to distinguish them from other free black groups. Under the leadership of African and Cuban historian Henry Lovejoy, this population now has a specialized online archive and research center—LiberatedAfricans.org which project I have been a part of the contributing research group.

In 2002 around the time that I was finishing my first book manuscript, I presented a conference paper on the way that Africans rescued from illegal slave ships joined other free blacks in the Bahamas in becoming involved with local controversies over the international abolition of slavery and slave trading around Africa and the Americas. Specifically, the paper focused on the ways that liberated Africans, and recently emancipated people of African descent in sought to thwart U.S. attempts to reclaim a group of captive African-Americans from the slave ship Creole in 1842. The African-Americans in that case had staged a mutiny and brought the slave ship, originally bound from Virginia to Louisiana, into Nassau, Bahamas, a British colonial port, then almost a decade after British emancipation. The paper argued that the Africans recently rescued from Atlantic slave ships, and the longer standing black Caribbean population, expressed both an African diaspora consciousness, and a regional anti-slavery solidarity in their opposition to the attempts to re-enslave the Creole mutineers. Observers have rightly critiqued the way that British authorities often portrayed liberated Africans as literal human evidence of the depth of British commitment to emancipation, and even black rights. My own ongoing research focuses more on how liberated Africans themselves participated in the everyday experiences, and larger political debates, which shaped the so-called age of emancipation. Those debates at their core sought to shape the future of black freedom, in labor, politics, and social and cultural life, around the Americas.

My current book project is tentatively entitled Africans Imagine the Age of Emancipation: Revisiting the Meanings of Abolition through Nineteenth-Century Survivors of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The earliest liberated Africans rescued and re-settled by British authorities came mostly from Spanish slave vessels between 1807 and 1819, despite the fact that the majority of that time period occurred before the first Anglo-Spanish slave trade suppression treaty of 1817. As Jenny Martinez has shown in her work on The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (2014), over the course of the nineteenth-century British, Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian and U.S. authorities would develop one of the earliest international legal regimens focused on a human rights question. However, in the early decades of the nineteenth century British authorities processed such cases in national vice admiralty courts in three of their northern Caribbean territories, Antigua, the Bahamas and Tortola. In addition to the records generated at the time of the seizure of these slave ships, in the 1810s and 1820s local colonial officials documented the daily lives and especially the labor experiences of these free African settlers, in part looking to them as a possible model for how more universal slave emancipation might occur. My manuscript in progress uses these records to reconstruct a black-centered commentary and critique of this often celebrated era of regional emancipation.

I am also working on a collective biography of a group of liberated African men who entered into British military service and ended up stationed in Havana harbor as a part of mid-nineteenth-century British agreements with Spain for joint suppression of the illegal slave trade to Cuba. This project particularly seeks to explore the relationship between these free African men serving as British colonial subjects and the diverse groups of African and African-descended populations in Havana, both free and enslaved. Despite the longstanding presence of various free people of African descent in Cuba, as elsewhere in the Spanish colonial Americas, authorities in Cuba seemed to fear the specific transnational anti-slavery identity of this population. The project takes its title from the words of one Spanish official articulating this fear: “Negroes with the Habit of Freedom”: Black African Soldiers, British Abolition and Slave Trade Suppression in Cuba. Other related projects include biographical work on abolitionist David Turnbull, who briefly served as a British consul in Havana. Cuban authorities routinely suspected him of fomenting slave rebellion; and he may indeed have had an idealized vision of a revolutionary slave uprising in Cuba, assisted by free black populations from adjacent British Caribbean territories. I am also working on a micro history of rape and assault aboard an Atlantic slave ship in the mid-nineteenth century. The tracing of the lives of the captive Africans aboard this vessel and the assaults committed against them is made possible because of British and Spanish legal and diplomatic processes related to slave trade suppression. However, the project itself seeks to explore more widely the understanding of intimate violence against African bodies and minds in the long history of Atlantic slave trading.

At Tulane I have taught undergraduate and graduate students broadly in African diaspora, Caribbean and African-American History courses. I have also engaged in local public history efforts including co-organization of a 2011 conference marking the bicentennial of the 1811 Louisiana Slave Uprising. This rebellion has significant linkages to the Haitian Revolution, both in its ideological orientation and in the participation of enslaved people brought to Louisiana after the destruction of slavery in that Caribbean territory. I also co-direct, with Nell Bolton, of the Frances Gaudet Legacy Project, which is designed to build a publicly accessible history of this independent black educator and reformer from Mississippi and Louisiana. From 2013 to 2020 I served as the faculty administrative director for the Tulane Africana Studies Program

Professionally I have served on local organizing committees for the hosting in New Orleans of meetings of the Caribbean Studies Association, the Haitian Studies Association, the Organization of American History and the American Historical Association. I have also served on the nominating committee of the Association of Caribbean Historians, and on the board of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora.

Born in Havana, Handy Acosta Cuellar has a track history as a young leader in the field of the environment and youth participation in Cuba. In 2007, he was elected Regional Youth Advisor by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). The same year he obtained a degree in Education with specializations in environmental education and sustainable development from Havana Pedagogical University, and became a member of the Cuban National Environmental Education Network. He was a member of the Cuban non-governmental delegation to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20. In 2012 he was awarded the Jeanne Sauvé Fellowship to study and research at McGill University, Canada. He finished an M.A. in Romance Languages at the University of New Orleans and currently is a Ph.D. candidate at the Stone Center of Latin American studies. His research explores the connections between environment, education, and technology and media use in Cuba in the last decade, especially after the “La Batalla de Ideas” process.

Yuko Sato is a visiting scholar at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) at Tulane University and a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Missouri. Her research focuses on popular protests, voting behavior, democratization, with a regional focus on Latin America.

Her dissertation, Crisis of Democracy: Protest and Affective Polarization, systematically examines the relationship between political protests and mass polarization in democracies. Her central argument is that protests serve as a focal event that may change voters’ perceptions. In her dissertation, she seeks to expand psychological approaches to mass polarization by theorizing and testing how political protest may enhance individual partisan identities. Specifically, she considers how exposure to protest activates and reinforces pre-existing partisan identities- including positive and negative- and ultimately triggers to affective polarization. She utilizes a range of quantitative analyses, including time-series and cross-national studies and survey analysis with a natural experiment, to study the effect of protest on the level of polarization cross- and sub-nationally. She also triangulates quantitative methods with qualitative data gathered during her fieldwork in Brazil.

Yuko’s research has been supported by the Kinder Institute of Constitutional Democracy, University of Missouri, and the K. Matsushita Memorial Foundation. She has published articles in Electoral Studies and Democratization.