Adrián Emmanuel Hernández-Acosta
Adrián Emmanuel Hernández-Acosta, a second-year postdoctoral fellow at Brown University’s Cogut Institute for the Humanities and Department of Hispanic Studies, has been appointed Assistant Professor of Religion and Literature in the Yale Institute of Sacred Music (ISM) and Yale Divinity School (YDS), effective July 1, 2023.
As an interdisciplinary humanities scholar and affiliate of Brown’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Hernández-Acosta’s research and teaching illuminates the relationship between religion, art, and theory through the study of the extensive artistic catalogue of the Hispanophone Caribbean and its diasporas. His current book project, Mortuary Poetics: Mourning, Religion, and Art, argues that mourning is a critical and creative practice within Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban writing and visual, performing, and multimodal arts. It examines the crucial role played by mourning in portrayals of African diaspora religions within Hispanophone Caribbean literature and art. In conversation with religious and literary studies as well as Black, Caribbean, Latin American, queer and trans studies, Mortuary Poetics contributes to broader conversations in humanistic study today about how to respond to personal and collective loss in a world seemingly determined to let the lives of so many fall away.
“We are thrilled that Dr. Hernández-Acosta is joining our faculties,” said Professor Martin Jean, director of the ISM. “His scholarship and teaching will bring voices to the conversations here that have been woefully absent. He is brilliant, visionary, and compassionate – qualities our community will cherish and support.”