Date:
For a recording of this event, click here.
Speakers; Margaret E. Crahan, Senior Research Scholar and Director of the Cuba Program at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Columbia University; Maha Marouan, Visiting Scholar, Weatherhead Scholars Program at Harvard University; Associate Professor, Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and African Studies Program, The Pennsylvania State University; Mabel Cuesta, US Latino and Spanish Caribbean Literature Professor at University of Houston, Texas; Petra Kuivala, Associate at the Department of History at Harvard University and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki
Moderated by: Tania Bruguera, Senior Lecturer In Media & Performance, Theater, Dance & Media, Affiliate Of Art, Film, And Visual Studies and the Interim Chair of the Cuba Studies Program at Harvard University
The panel will discuss the role of religion in Cuban society on the 21st century. It will provide an overview of the political, economic, and social development in Cuba in recent years, asking how religion either contributes to or disrupts such processes of social change. The panelists will discuss themes such as religion as a social force, gendered religious agency and religious charity, the lived experience of LGBTQ+ religious communities on the island, and the nexus of santería, tourism, and commercial religion.
Dr. Margaret E. Crahan is a Senior Research Scholar and Director of the Cuba Program at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Columbia University. From 2007-09 she was the Kozmetsky Distinguished Professor and Director of the Kozmetsky Center of Excellence in Global Finance at St. Edward’s University, from 1982-1994 she was the Henry R. Luce Professor of Religion, Power and Political Process at Occidental College and from 1994-2008 the Dorothy Epstein Professor of the City University of New York. She serves on the Executive Committee of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights and the Latin American Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and was a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of St. Edward’s University (2002-2021). In 2013 she was recognized by the government of Brazil for her work on human rights. Dr. Crahan has published over one hundred articles and books including Human Rights and Basic Needs in the Americas; Religion, Culture and Society: The Case of Cuba; The City and the World: New York’s Global Future; The Wars on Terrorism and Iraq: Human Rights, Unilateralism, and US Foreign Policy (with Thomas G. Weiss and John Goering) and co-edited and co-authored Cuba-US Relations: Normalization and Its Challenges and Donald J. Trump y las relaciones Cuba-Estados Unidos en la encrucijada. She has done research in Mexico, Central America, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and visited Cuba for research more than 50 times since 1973. She received her doctorate from Columbia University.
Maha Marouan is Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, African American Studies and African Studies at the Pennsylvania State University and the Co-Director of the African Feminist Initiative at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of research include African feminisms, migration and gender, race and religion in Africa and the African Diaspora. Her latest publication includes an edited series on African Women, Gender and Migration in Africa Is A country.
Petra Kuivala, Doctor of Theology, is Associate at the Department of History at Harvard University and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki. Kuivala has worked also as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. Her research and teaching intersect with the fields of theology and the study of religion, history, Cuban studies, and Latin American studies, addressing Christianity in the Americas, with a particular focus on religion in Cuba, the Cuban Revolution, and socialist society. Dr. Kuivala’s articles have been published in, among others, Cuban Studies, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and International Journal of Cuban Studies. Her current research project, The Revolution, Religion, and Social Experience in Cuba, 1961–1991, funded by the Academy of Finland, analyzes the intersections of religion and lived experience in the social histories of the Cuban Revolution.
Mabel Cuesta is a scholar, poet and fiction writer. She holds a Licenciatura in Hispanic Literatures from University of Havana, and a Doctorate from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published In Your Face, Papi! Arte, Política y Sociedad Civil en Cuba (Aduana Vieja, 2022); Asintomática. Escrituras del encierro en tiempos de coronavirus (Hypermedia, 2021); Lecturas Atentas. Una visita desde la ficción y la crítica a veinte narradoras cubanas contemporáneas (Almenara, 2019); In Via, In Patria (Literal Publishing, 2016 & Ediciones Matanzas, 2019); Nuestro Caribe. Poder, raza y postnacionalismos desde los límites del mapa LGBTQ (Isla Negra, 2016) and Cuba post-soviética: un cuerpo narrado en clave de mujer (Cuarto Propio, 2012). She is a US Latino and Spanish Caribbean Literature Professor at University of Houston, Texas since 2011.
Tania Bruguera is a Cuban artist and activist whose performances and installations examine political power structures and their effect on society's most vulnerable people. Her long-term projects have been intensive interventions on the institutional structure of collective memory, education and politics. Bruguera has received many honours such as the Velazquez Prize, the Robert Rauschenberg Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Prince Claus Fund Laureate Her work has been extensively exhibited around the world, including the Tate Turbine Hall Commission and Documenta 11. Her work is in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Van Abbemuseum, Tate Modern and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana. Bruguera is Senior Lecturer In Media & Performance, Theater, Dance & Media, Affiliate Of Art, Film, And Visual Studies and the Interim Chair of the Cuba Studies Program at Harvard University.
Presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Scholars Program at Harvard University