Education
Ph.D., Religion, Harvard University
M.A., Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
M.Div., Harvard Divinity School
B.A., Religion and Music, Tufts University
Biography
Professor Hernández-Acosta is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research and teaching fosters dialogue between religions and the arts. He specializes in historically informed and theoretically conversant study of the literary, musical, visual, and cinematic arts of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Approaching the Caribbean as a threshold between disciplines, traditions, and languages, Professor Hernández-Acosta focuses primarily on Spanish and English, but sustains conversations with French and Portuguese as well as Italian, ancient Greek, and Latin. His two current book projects exhibit a range of interests—from literatures of the ancient Mediterranean as well as medieval and early modern debates on poetics to Spanish literary traditions and Africana religions—as these converge in Caribbean reception.
His first book project analyzes a duel waged in verse, prose, and body between two queer Cuban poets from the twentieth century—José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera. At the center of their duel is the reception of the Furies as Greco-Roman figures of interminable mourning. This book posits reception as a mode of receptivity that simultaneously activates various layers of the past in their very significance for a given present. In conversation with the subfields of classical reception, religion and literature, and postcritical literary studies, the book revisits notions of mimesis (Plato and Aristotle), counterpoint (Fernando Ortiz and Edward Said), and askesis (Michel Foucault, Lauren Berlant, and Lee Edelman) to freshly theorize receptivity itself in the work of mourning today.
His second book project analyzes how figures of the slain and suicidal in the arts of the insular Hispanophone Caribbean transmit the critical force of mourning in scenes of Africana religions. This book follows that trope of tropes known as metalepsis, which is characterized by its transfer of a figure of speech from one context to another. It extends conversations with literary theorizations of metalepsis, such as poetic allusion (Harold Bloom), boundary transgression (Gérard Genette), and critical posture (Hortense Spillers), as well as with those who regard language more broadly as a determining factor in human experience (from Aristotle to Lacan and Derrida). The book highlights how the predicaments of mourning are always also predicated—that is, articulated in language. Moreover, it calls for an orientation to mourning that is not merely resistant or reparative, but waywardly receptive due to the divagations of language itself.
Taken together, these two book projects offer crisp accounts of power in aesthetics ethics, and politics at the supple intersection of the theory and practice of religions and the arts. Professor Hernández-Acosta cultivates both breadth and precision in his research and teaching from a commitment to tarry with the dead and dying in a world seemingly determined to let the lives of so many fall away.
Professor Hernández-Acosta’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, and the Journal of Africana Religions. His research has been supported by a Visiting Faculty Fellowship form the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. He has also been invited to share from his work beyond traditional academic settings, including the David Castillo Art Gallery in Miami, Political Theology Network, and ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latin America.
Read more
- ‘To tarry with life in this world’: New professor examines the work of mourning
- Adrián Emmanuel Hernández-Acosta appointed as new professor of Religion and Literature(link is external)
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