About my research
My doctoral research traces how the study of folklore and music became an instrumental vehicle for international solidarity during and after the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915-1934. I bring to life a moment when Haiti was at the center of a cosmopolitan network of anthropologists, folklorists, musicians, dancers, writers, and radicals who contributed to major contemporary discourse on human culture and equality. As a response to the occupation, there arose a “folkloric movement” whose progenitors including Georges Sylvain, Jean Price-Mars, Ludovic Lamothe, Arthur Duroseau, Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, and Jacques Roumain would go on to shape the study of Haitian culture and the international African diaspora. On the heels of the occupation, American cultural luminaries including Melville Herskovits, Zora Neale Hurston, Alan Lomax, Katherine Dunham, and Harold Courlander traveled to Haiti to collect songs and tales. What they learned in Haiti would go on to shape the trajectory of their careers, and in turn influence future generations of scholars, artists, and intellectuals. This is the story of how Haiti contributed to the fields of folklore and ethnomusicology at a critical moment in their development in the early twentieth century.
I am a Ph.D. candidate in African diaspora history at New York University and teach Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University. My other projects include a people’s history of Washington Heights and Uptown NYC, and my family’s history in the borderlands of Sonora and Arizona.
