Adrián Emmanuel Hernández-Acosta
Ph.D., Committee on the Study of Religion, Harvard University
M.A., Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
M.Div., Harvard Divinity School
B.A., Religion and Music, Tufts University
Professor Hernández-Acosta is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar whose research and teaching illuminate the relationship between religion and art through historically-informed and theoretically-conversant study of the extensive artistic catalogue of the Caribbean and its diasporas. His current research agenda develops what he calls “mortuary poetics” in Hispanophone Caribbean art. As a framework, mortuary poetics takes critical inventory of the ways in which figures of the dead—culled from mythical, religious, historical and/or ethnographic discourses—emerge in literature, visual art, cinema, and music, while attending to the politics of race, religion, class, gender, and sexuality.
Within the framework of mortuary poetics, Professor Hernández-Acosta is currently working on two book projects. The first book is Furies: Poetic Mediations in the Wake of Death, which analyzes how two queer Cuban poets—José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera—critically draw on Greco-Roman myth in their argument over poetry’s aesthetic, ethical, and political mediation of mourning in the wake of death. The second book, Metalepsis in Mourning: The Dead Between Religion and Art in the Hispanophone Caribbean, expands on the first book by analyzing Dominican and Puerto Rican writers alongside Cuban ones and includes visual art, cinema, and music alongside the literary sources.
Professor Hernández-Acosta has published in Political Theology Network, ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latin America, and Transforming Anthropology. His article, “On Method and Mourning in Judith Butler’s Theory of Performativity,” is forthcoming in a special issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. His work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including a Visiting Faculty Fellowship from the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. He has also been invited to share his work beyond traditional academic settings, such as the Belkis Ayón Exhibit at the David Castillo Art Gallery in Miami.
