Research Interests
My research examines how national, linguistic, and disciplinary borders shape the ways we understand and interpret cultural production in Francophone and Latin American studies. While these categories have provided important frameworks for literary criticism, they can also obscure the connections, exchanges, and tensions that exist across established cultural and geographical boundaries.
My work questions assumptions of cultural homogeneity and explores the fractures and intersections that reveal relationships among seemingly distinct literary traditions. I am particularly interested in Caribbean literature and cultural production, representations of death and displacement, and the ways literature challenges dominant narratives of national identity, history, and belonging.
This comparative perspective has informed my scholarship on René Depestre, Maryse Condé, and Santiago Gamboa, as well as my translation of Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella, a nineteenth-century Haitian novel. My developing research continues to explore cultural circulation across languages and borders, including the ways Haitian cultural figures and narratives are transformed as they travel through different literary and historical contexts.
Scholarship
Stella – Émeric Bergeaud
My English translation of Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella (Markus Wiener Publishers, 2014) reflects my longstanding interest in Haitian literature, cultural memory, and the movement of texts across linguistic boundaries. Written in the nineteenth century, Stella is an important work of Haitian literary history that engages with the Haitian Revolution and the struggle for independence. Translating the novel offered an opportunity to bring this work to English-speaking readers while engaging with questions of language, history, and the representation of Haiti’s revolutionary past.
Publication: Émeric Bergeaud, Stella. Translated by Adriana Umaña Hossman. Introduction by Luis Duno-Gottberg. Markus Wiener Publishers, 2014.
Current Research
The Rebel Zombi in the Works of René Depestre
I am currently developing a scholarly article examining the figure of the rebel zombi in the works of Haitian writer René Depestre. Building on my earlier research on representations of death, displacement, and cultural identity in Caribbean literature, this article explores how Depestre reimagines the zombi in relation to histories of enslavement, resistance, and liberation. I am particularly interested in the tensions between zombification as a condition of domination and the possibility of reclaiming agency through rebellion.
This research also informs my broader interest in the circulation and transformation of the Haitian zombi across linguistic and cultural boundaries.
Digital Humanities
Unquiet Borders: Mapping the Haitian Zombi across Languages, Cultures and Histories
Unquiet Borders: Mapping the Haitian Zombi across Languages, Cultures, and Histories is a developing digital humanities project that investigates the circulation and transformation of the Haitian zombi across French, Spanish, and English-language cultural productions.
The project explores how representations of zombification illuminate histories of enslavement, resistance, displacement, rebellion, and novel ideas of cultural belonging. Combining comparative cultural analysis with digital mapping and multilingual textual analysis, it seeks to trace connections among literary works, historical contexts, and cultural traditions that are often studied separately.
At its center is a question that has long informed my scholarship: what becomes visible when we examine cultural production beyond established national, linguistic, and disciplinary borders?
