Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Adrián Emmanuel Hernández-Acosta is a fall 2021–spring 2023 Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Hispanic Studies, with affiliations with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and American Studies. His research and teaching explore the literary, religious, and theoretical aspects of 20th- and 21st-century Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban writing and various arts (visual, performing, multimodal, etc.). His current book project develops the concept of “mortuary poetics” to examine the vital role played by mourning in portrayals of African diaspora religions within contemporary Hispanophone Caribbean literature and art. In the Fall of 2022, he will teach a course titled “Blackness and Puerto Rican Literature,” which focuses on discourses of racial blackness in key Puerto Rican texts from the 19th century to the present.

He earned a Ph.D in the study of religion and an M.A. in Romance languages and literatures from Harvard University as well as an M.Div from Harvard Divinity School. He has served as assistant managing editor for Transforming Anthropology, the flagship journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists, and his creative nonfiction is published on public platforms such as ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Political Theology Network, and La Respuesta Magazine.

In 2021–2022, he presented his research at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Brown’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Brown’s Modern Languages Conference, and Brown’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.

Read an interview about his research in The Humanities in Practice.