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March 2009
Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús Is New
Assistant Professor of African American Religions
Contact:
Jonathan Beasley, 617.496.6004
Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, a Stanford
University scholar of social and cultural anthropology and of Africana
and Latino/a studies, has been appointed Assistant Professor of African
American Religions, effective July 1, 2009.
"We are delighted to welcome Aisha
Beliso-De Jesús to Harvard," said Dean William A. Graham. "Her strong
anthropological skills and her work in Cuban Santería within the study
of African American religious traditions will bring important new
offerings to our curriculum."
Her hands-on research with Santería
practitioners has taken her to, among other places, Miami, San
Francisco, New York City, and Havana, Cuba, where she studied travel,
religious tourism, return dynamics, and the uses, practices,
circulation, and consumption of religious media. In 2003, she spent four
months in San Jose, California, with Latina women who were recovering
substance abusers enrolled in the Women's Wellness Substance Abuse
Program.
"Harvard Divinity School is known for
its commitment to critical inquiry coupled with its respect and
sensitivity to understanding religious experiences from many different
perspectives," Beliso-De Jesús said. "The dynamic environment,
impressive students, and brilliant faculty all draw me toward HDS as a
wonderful place to continue my own work as an anthropologist and
religious practitioner of Afro-Cuban Santería."
For nearly 16 years, she has been active
in numerous community service efforts and is a frequent public speaker,
advocating education and nonviolence for youth. Since 2007, she has
served as a volunteer consultant for HOMEY SF, a gang prevention,
community-based organization, where she provides public policy analysis,
strategic consultations, community advising, and workshops for high-risk
San Francisco youth. Some of Beliso-De Jesús's areas of teaching and
research include: Africana and the African Diaspora; anthropology of the
Caribbean and Latin America; postcolonial theory; studies and
ethnography of the Internet; and commodification of culture.
Beliso-De Jesús will receive her PhD
from Stanford in June 2009, and her dissertation, "Becoming Santería: A
Transnational Study of Cultural Politics, Media and Religion in Cuba and
the United States," examines the interrelated cultural politics by which
Santería and Ifá religious practices are reinvented, circulated, and
transformed through transnational processes, travel, tourism,
consumption, and media between the United States and Cuba. By
emphasizing the longevity of transnational practices, this project
historicizes commonly overlooked assumptions and truths on Santería,
Africa, and Latinos in the United States.
"The move by Harvard Divinity School to
take these religious practices and emerging body of knowledge seriously
is, I believe, a crucial one that will set new standards across both
religious and theological studies, as well as anthropology," Beliso-De
Jesús said. "I am committed to this revisionist as well as
transformative scholarly engagement and hope to bring a perspective
where students who are interested in exploring new ethnographic
perspectives of religion, as well as African diasporic religious
experiences will be able to develop their own methods for research and
study. As an anthropologist, I will offer classes on ethnographic
methods of religious experiences, African diaspora religions, and
critical theories of race, gender, and sexuality."
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