CLACS Faculty Lecture Series.
Adrian Emmanuel Hernandez-Acosta is a postdoctoral fellow in the Hispanic Studies Department and the Cogut Institute. He is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar whose research explores the role played by mourning in the formation of race, gender, and sexuality through readings of African diaspora religions in Hispanophone Caribbean literature and culture. Adrian’s current project, which seeks to expand his dissertation into a book manuscript, provides a critical inventory of the ways in which African diaspora religions are portrayed in scenes of death and mourning within Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban literature, film, and visual art. Analyzing this critical inventory leads him to propose a “mortuary poetics” as a fruitful framework for thinking about mourning, literature, and religion in a Caribbean context. This semester, Adrian is teaching an English-language course on queer Hispanophone Caribbean literature and next semester he’ll be teaching a Spanish-language course exploring the relationship between mourning and experimental form in Hispanophone Caribbean literature.