HTI Alumni

Adrián Emmanuel Hernández Acosta

Postdoctoral Research Associate in International Humanities at Brown University

Field of Study: Theology

Dr. Adrián Emmanuel Hernández-Acosta is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Hispanic Studies, with affiliations with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and American Studies. His research and teaching explore the literary, religious, and theoretical aspects of 20th- and 21st-century Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban writing and various arts (visual, performing, multimodal, etc.). His current book project develops the concept of “mortuary poetics” to examine the vital role played by mourning in portrayals of African diaspora religions within contemporary Hispanophone Caribbean literature and art. In the Fall of 2022, he taught a course titled “Blackness and Puerto Rican Literature,” which focuses on discourses of racial blackness in key Puerto Rican texts from the 19th century to the present.

He earned a PhD in the study of religion and an M.A. in Romance languages and literatures from Harvard University as well as an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School. He has served as assistant managing editor for Transforming Anthropology, the flagship journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists, and his creative nonfiction is published on public platforms such as ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Political Theology Network, and La Respuesta Magazine.