People

Department of Anthropology

Sean Brotherton

Brotherton’s research and teaching interests include the critical study of health, medicine, the state, subjectivity, and the body. His theoretical references draw on contemporary social theory and postcolonial studies. His ethnographic research is carried out in the Caribbean, particularly Cuba and Jamaica. Brotherton is currently completing a book-length manuscript, tentatively titled Machinations of the State: Macroeconomic Change, Emergent Capital, and the Biopolitics of Health in Post-Soviet Cuba. The book is an ethnographic examination of how Cuba’s shifting state policies and external global factors have interacted with each other to change the course of health and medicine in the socialist island-nation. Using individualpractices relating to the body and health as an ethnographic starting point, the book examines multiple pathways through which political subjectivities are created and transformed in contemporary Cuba.

Department of Classics

Emily Greenwood

Her research interests include ancient Greek historiography, Greek prose literature of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, twentieth century classical receptions (especially uses of Classics in Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, and Greece), Classics and Postcolonialism, and the theory and practice of translating the ‘classics’ of Greek and Roman literature. She is more than happy to talk to students who are interested in working in any of these areas.

Department of Comparative Literature

Moira Fradinger

Research interests: South American, Caribbean and European fiction, film and intellectual history; Ancient Greek and modern tragedy; the French revolutionary imagination; Haiti; French and Italian cultural exchanges with Latin America; literary and feminist theory; political philosophy; anthropology of violence; psychoanalysis; film studies and Third Cinema. She is the author of Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins (Stanford UP, 2010) and is currently working on a second book-length project on the Latin American rewritings of Antigone, with the working title “Pan-American Antigones.” She has two other projects in progress: a study of Latin American cinema in the sixties, and a study of the anarchist imagination, focusing on anarchist journals produced on both sides of the Atlantic at the beginning of the XX century. She has also translated literary texts from a number of Romance languages into English.

Roberto González Echevarría

Sterling Professor of Comparative and Hispanic Literatures, Roberto González Echevarría is one of the leading Caribbeanists of our times. He has written extensively on major Caribbean writers such as Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, Fernando Ortiz, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, and on aspects of Caribbean culture including music, dance, and baseball. Awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2010 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, González Echevarría is the author of Cuban Fiestas (2010); Oye mi son: testimonios y ensayos sobre literatura hispanoamericana (2008); The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball (1999; in Spanish, 2004); Myth and Archive: A Theory of the Latin American Narrative (1990; in Spanish, 2000, 2011); La ruta de Severo Sarduy (1986); Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (1977; in Spanish 1993, 2004) and Relecturas: estudios de literatura cubana (1976). He is editor or co-editor of Cartas de Carpentier (2008); Cuba: un siglo de literatura (1902-2002) (2004); The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories (1997); The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature (Cambridge, 1996, in Spanish 2006); Severo Sarduy, De donde son los cantantes (1993); Alejo Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos (1985); and Antonio Benítez Rojo, Estatuas sepultadas y otros relatos (1984). Two Madrid-based Cuban journals have devoted special issues to his work: Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana (2004) and Otrolunes (2007). He has received honorary doctorates from several universities, including Columbia University in 2002, and in that same year the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Arecibo, held a symposium in his honor.

Department of English

Anthony Reed

My research and teaching focus on poetics and 20th/21st century global black writing, investigating the intersections of aesthetics and politics in literature, film and other media. In my current project, The Other Side of Time: The Poetics of Black Experimental Writing, I emphasize the ways literary form and literature’s articulations of time challenge dominant ways of conceiving black writing and cultural production. Privileging poetics—the analysis of the means through which literature achieves its effects—against hermeneutics—interpretation rooted largely in those things literature represents—I trace some of the avenues opened for literary studies by contemporary poetry’s troubling the traditional lyric genre. My next project will look at the relationship between writing and improvisation as referent, practice and formal principle.

Teaches courses on Caribbean Poetry.

Department of French

Alyson Waters

Translator of contemporary works of French and Francophone fiction, literary criticism and theory, art history. My research is on translingual writers, contemporary French and Francophone fiction, translation and self-translation. Currently teaching a class on Translation of Caribbean writers.

Catherine Fox

Catherine is in her third year of the joint doctoral program in French and African American Studies. Her interests include literature and history of the French-speaking Caribbean, Haiti, and postcolonial theory.

Kristin Graves

Kristin received her B.A. from Tulane University in 2008 with majors in French, English, and Art History as well as minors in Italian Studies and History. She is in Yale’s joint program in French and African American American Studies. Her general interests include nineteenth and twentieth century expatriation, performance, politics of reception, queer theory, and dialogue between art and literature.

Department of History

Mariola Espinosa

Mariola Espinosa’s primary research interest is the role of disease and public health in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean. Specifically, she concentrates on how diseases and responses to them shape relations of power between the peoples of the region and other actors in the international system. Her book, Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878-1930, focuses on the many ways that endemic yellow fever in Havana influenced Cubans’ relationships with the United States during the latter decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. She is currently working on new research that broadens the study of the effects of disease on empire to other Caribbean contexts.

Jennifer Lamble

Jennifer graduated with an A.B. in Gender Studies (Honors) and History and an A.M. in History from Brown University. At Yale she works on the twentieth-century history of the Caribbean, Latin America, and their diasporas, with particular attention to the history of psychiatry.