Stephan Palmie is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He conducts ethnographic and historical research on Afro-Caribbean cultures, with an emphasis on Afro-Cuban religious formations and their relations to the history and cultures of a wider Atlantic world. His other interests include practices of historical representation and knowledge production, systems of slavery and unfree labor, constructions of race and ethnicity, conceptions of embodiment and moral personhood, medical anthropology, and the anthropology of food and cuisine. Among his many academic contributions, Professor Palmie is widely regarded for his book Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (Duke University Press). He is also co-author of The Caribbean: a History of the Region and its Peoples (University of Chicago Press) and editor of Africas of the Americas: Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of Afro-atlantic Religions (Brill Academic Publishing).
Yale Professors Kamari Clarke and Jafari Allen responded to Professor Palmie’s lecture. Professor Clarke is a Professor of Anthropology and International and Area Studies at Yale University. She is the Chair of the Yale Council on African Studies (with a courtesy appointment in (African American Studies) and is a collaborative partner of the distinguished Leadership Enterprise for African Development (LEAD) – a collaborative project between Harvard and Yale Universities and the Institute for Research on African Women, Children and Culture (IRAWCC) that seeks to deepen the process of reform and revitalization in African countries by strengthening leadership and governance capacity in the public, business, and civil society sectors.
She is author of Fictions of Justice: International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge University Press), Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities (Duke University Press), among other notable books.
Professor Allen is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies. He researches at the intersections of queer sexuality, gender and blackness in Cuba, the US, and transnationally. He teaches courses on the cultural politics of race, sexuality and gender in Black diasporas; Black feminist and queer theory; critical cultural studies; ethnographic methodology and writing; subjectivity, consciousness and resistance; Cuba and the Caribbean. His recent book is entitled ¡Venceremos?: Sexuality, Gender and Black Self-Making in Cuba (Duke University Press).