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
Adrián Emmanuel Hernández-Acosta is Assistant Professor of Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He is a theoretically conversant and historically informed scholar of religion and literature who approaches the act of reading as a vital practice for the humanities from the vantage point of the Caribbean and its diasporas—their complex religious pluralities and extensive artistic catalogues. Across his research and teaching, Professor Hernández-Acosta recasts the tension between devotion and critique not as incompatible positions but as entangled postures by theorizing modes of reading in terms of “receptivity”—that is, the body’s trained capacity to suffer and solicit change from sensible signs. To that end, he centers translation in his three-fold research method: repeatedly engaging formal analysis, historical contextualization, and dialogical theorization in polyglottal receptivity. In this, he remains receptive to the reading modes of his own Caribbean subjects of study, who themselves translate across canons, genres, and disciplines.
His first book, Of Receptivity: How Two Cubans Dueled with the Classical Mediterranean (under review with the Classics in Theory series at Oxford University Press), introduces receptivity to rethink the lifelong feud over the role of art in the work of mourning that two queer Cuban writers waged in verse, prose, and body. Throughout their duel, both writers—José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera—deploy versions of Greco-Roman literary characters. Their shared classicism is a dynamically mournful reading practice that exercises the capacity of both the ancient and the contemporary to mutually suffer and solicit change. The critical dimension of their devotion and the devotional force of their critique open a way forward for the study of religion and literature.
Professor Hernández-Acosta has articles published or forthcoming in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 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 been invited to share from his work beyond traditional academic settings, including the David Castillo Art Gallery in Miami and Political Theology Network. And he is also creator and producer of Escudriñando las escrituras, a Spanish-language podcast series discussing historical-critical readings of the Bible for Latinx Christian audiences.
Research Interests:
Caribbean literatures and cultures
Africana religions in the Caribbean Americas
Literary and cultural theory, translation, and reception studies
Black, queer, and trans studies
Psychoanalysis and deconstruction
Sample Graduate Courses:
Theory in Mourning: Readings in Religion, Race, Gender, and Sexuality
Epic Laments: Sorrow in Ancient and Contemporary Caribbean Literatures
Confession, Care, Conversion: Reading Foucault Reading Religion
Queer Aesthetics of Africana Religions
Mysticisms in Black Studies
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
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