Conversations in Atlantic Theory

Stacey Langwick , MPH, PhD, is a cultural and medical anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her research, writing, teaching and program building have focused on healing, medicine and the body in East Africa. She is author of Bodies, Politics and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania (2011) and co-editor of Medicine, Mobility and Power in Global Afric...

Dr. Eric C. Rath is a professor of history at the University of Kansas where he teaches courses on food history and premodern Japan. A leading specialist in Japanese food culture, Dr. Rath has authored more than thirty articles on Japanese food culture from ancient to modern times covering the history of food rituals, heirloom vegetables, confectionery, restaurants, tableware, and eating competiti...

Dr. Lauren (Robin) Derby ’s research has treated dictatorship and everyday life, the long durée social history of the Haitian and Dominican border, and how notions of race, national identity and witchcraft have been articulated in popular media such as rumor, food and animals. Her publications include the prize-winning The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Tr...

Dr. Chelsi West Ohueri is a sociocultural anthropologist and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research throughout Albania and the Balkan region, and in the US South.  In today’s conversation, we explore her book Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlif...

Dr. Samuele Collu is an Assistant Professor of Medical and Psychological Anthropology at McGill University. His research examines the entanglement between psychic life, therapeutic practices, and digital devices.  He is currently completing Dreams I Scroll Through, an experimental ethnography immersing the reader in a (mildly psychedelic) social media binge-scroll. Collu is also working on a proje...

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlanti...

Dr. Jonathan Howard is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English at Yale University. His research and teaching broadly interrogate western ideas about race and nature while also exploring black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice. His first book, Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness, undertakes a black ecocritical study of the “deep”...

Along with dozens of scholarly articles and a handful of edited books and journal issues, he is the author of seven books: Sensibility and Singularity (2001), Godard Between Identity and Difference (2008), Levinas and the Postcolonial (2012), Glissant and the Middle Passage (2019), and three recent books that are the occasion for our conversation, Atlantic Theory (2025), So Unimaginable a Price (2...

Professor Alejandro Luis Madrid is the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard University. He is a cultural theorist of sound and music working in Latin American and Latinx studies. Among other honors, he has received the Humboldt Research Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dent Medal, the Premio de Musicología Casa de las Américas, and awards from the American Musicological Society, t...

Dr. Akane Kanai is a feminist cultural studies scholar, currently based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. She researches the relational politics of identity, with a focus on how the emotional life of social media informs cultures of everyday knowledge. Her previous book, Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture , contributed a critique of relatability in theorizing the...

Dr. Marisa Solomon is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches courses in feminist intersectional science studies, environmental humanities, Black geographies, feminist theory and queer of color critique. She is currently the director of Barnard’s Interdisciplinary Race and Ethnic Studies Minor (ICORE/MORE), an edito...

Dr.   Kathleen "Kat" Cruz Gutierrez (Ph. D. Southeast Asian Studies, Berkeley) is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian history and the history of science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She writes on the history of botany, botanical taxonomies, and the recent scholarly "plant turn." Her research has been generously supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Henry Luce Fou...

Dr.   Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation citizen) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the Founding Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University.    In today’s conversation, we discuss Dr. Pierce’s latest monograph, Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (2025, Duke University Press) where...

Dr. Deborah A. Thomas is Chair and the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, and the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is also core faculty in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, holds secondary appointments with the Graduate School of Education and the Department of Africana Studies, and is a member of the graduate groups in Engli...

Dr. Bimbola Akinbola is an artist and scholar currently based in Chicago. Working at the intersection of African diapora studies, performance, and visual art, her scholarly and artistic work is concerned with the complicated and nagging nature of belonging, queerness, and the concept of family.   Dr. Akinbola's newly published book, Transatlantic Disbelonging: Unruliness, Pleasure and Play in Nige...

Dr. drea brown is a queer Black feminist poet-scholar whose writing has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Stand Our Ground: Poems for Marissa Alexander and Trayvon Martin, the Smithsonian Magazine, Southern Indiana Review, Bellingham Review and About Place Journal . drea is the author of dear girl: a reckoning , winner of the Gold Line Press 2014 chapbook prize, and co-editor of Teachin...

Dr. Atiya Husain is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and a faculty affiliate in Anthropology/Sociology at Williams College. Her work has been published in scholarly journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies , Sociology of Race and Ethnicity , as well as popular outlets including Boston Review , Slate , and Adi Magazine . She is a founding co-editor of the University of Toronto Press series...

Dr. Celina de Sá is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Originally from the SF Bay Area, she received her PhD with distinction at the University of Pennsylvania in Africana Studies and Anthropology. Outside of her professional life, she is also a capoeirista and training to be a flamenco dancer.   In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph Dia...

Dr. Julia Elyachar is an author, anthropologist, and political economist.  She was trained in anthropology, economics, history of political and economic thought, political economy, social theory, Middle Eastern Studies, and Arabic language. At Princeton, she is an associate professor of anthropology, and associate professor at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She rec...

Dr. Élika Ortega is assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado, Boulder . Dr. Ortega writes about the intersection of digital and print publishing, digital literature, cultural hybridity, digital humanities, and multilingualism in academia. Her work on these topics has been published in venues like ASAP Journal , PMLA , Hispanic Review, Debates in...

Dr. Margaret J. Wiener is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book V isible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali (University of Chicago Press) won the 1995 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, awarded by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. Her publications have been grounded in many years of field research o...

Dr. Mary Poole is a historian of U.S. and African history, with an emphasis on histories of social movements, racial capitalism, colonialism, feminist and other critical social theory, and Indigenous decolonizing research methods. She has served on the faculty of Prescott College in Arizona since 2003. In the 1980s, she served as a fiscal analyst for the Washington State Senate Ways & Means Co...

Dr. Wendell Marsh is an Associate Professor of African Literature and Philosophy at Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique in Morocco. His work bridges Global Black Studies, African Studies, and Islamic Studies, with a focus on how African and diasporic intellectual traditions and expressive cultures reshape our understanding of knowledge, religion, and the humanities.    In today’s conversation, we...

Dr. José Miguel Palacios is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinematic Arts at California State University Long Beach. His work explores the relations between transnational histories of radical cinemas and questions of migration, solidarity, networks of cinematic exchange, and archival practices He has published in journals like Film Quarterly , Screen , The Moving Image , Jump Cut , an...

Dr. Caroline Fowler is Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute. In this conversation, we discuss her most recent book, Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art was published with Duke University Press, 2025. In this project, Dr. Fowler examines the fundamental role of the transatlantic slave trade in the production and evolution of seventeenth-century Dutch art...