ABOUT US
The Caribbean Philosophical Association was founded on June 14, 2003 at the Center for Caribbean Thought at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. The founding members were George Belle, B. Anthony Bogues, Patrick Goodin, Lewis Gordon, Clevis Headley, Paget Henry, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Charles Mills, and Supriya Nair. The first international conference was held May 19–22, 2004 at the Accra Hotel in Christ Church, Barbados, West Indies.
The Caribbean Philosophical Association is an organization of scholars and lay-intellectuals dedicated to the study and generation of ideas with a particular emphasis of encouraging South-South dialogue. Although the focus is on engaging philosophy that emerges in the Caribbean, membership is not limited exclusively to scholars with degrees in philosophy, and any region and historic moment is open to the exchange of ideas. In similar kind, membership in the organization is not limited to professional scholars. Any one with an interest in engaging ideas and playing a role in the development of new ideas can become a member. Finally, the Caribbean Philosophical Association is also dedicated to assisting with the development of institutions that would preserve thought in the Caribbean and facilitate the creation of new ideas.
Executive Officers Secretaries Former Executive Officers Former Secretaries
Vice President Emeritus
Paget Henry is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. His specializations are Dependency Theory, Caribbean Political Economy, Sociology of Religion, Sociology of Art and Literature, Africana Philosophy and Religion, Race and Ethnic Relations, Poststructuralism, and Critical Theory. He has served on the faculties of S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook, University of the West Indies (Antigua) and the University of Virginia. Henry is editor of The C.L.R. James Journal and co-editor of the Routledge series Africana Thought. He is also an external examiner for the University of the West Indies and the University of Guyana. His awards and fellowships include Research Fellow at the Bildner Center for Western Hemispheric Studies, Research Fellow at the Center for Inter-American Relations, and a Ford Foundation Grant. Read more…
Camille Monahan earned her J.D. at Marquette University Law School in 2009 and took a trial attorney position with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the summer of that year. She has a dual specialty in feminist legal issues and disability discrimination. Camille has published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. She was also part of the legal team in the ground-breaking Resources for Human Development case, which determined that morbid-obesity can be a covered disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act. During law school, Camille clerked with an NGO in Barbados. While there she conducted research comparing the historic rates of women’s graduation from college in business related fields with the number of women holding positions on the boards of companies traded on the Barbadian and Trinidadian stock exchanges and helped to organize a conference on women’s issues.
President Emeritus
Lewis Ricardo Gordon is Chairperson of the Awards Committee of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, with affiliations in Caribbean, Latina/o, and Latin American Studies and Judaic Studies at the University of Connecticut at Storrs; Europhilosophy Visiting Professor at Toulouse University, France; and Nelson Mandela Visiting Professor of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University, South Africa. He is the founding President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association (2003–2008). Click here to visit his website.
Director of the CPA Summer School
President Emerita
Jane Gordon, a specialist in Africana political, social, and educational thought, modern and contemporary European social and political theory, methodologies in the social sciences, and contemporary slavery, is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. She previously taught in the Department of Political Science at Temple University where she was a 2009-2010 faculty fellow at the Center for the Humanities. Her first book, Why They Couldn’t Wait: A Critique of the Black-Jewish Conflict over Community Control in Ocean Hill-Brownsville (RoutledgeFalmer 2001), was listed by the Gotham Gazette as one of the four best recent books on civil rights. She is co-editor with Lewis R. Gordon of Not Only the Master’s Tools (Paradigm, 2006) and of The Companion to African American Studies, which was the NetLibrary Book of the Month in February 2007. She is also the co-author of Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age and author of the forthcoming Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (Fordham, 2014). Her articles have appeared in the C.L.R. James Journal: A Review of Caribbean Ideas, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Journal of Contemporary Thought, The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, Journal of Political Theology, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Performance Research,SOULS, and Philosophical Studies in Education. Her recent essay, “Theorizing Contemporary Practices of Enslavement: A Portrait of the Old and New,” won the American Political Science Association 2012 Foundations in Political Theory Best Paper Prize. She has been a member of the Caribbean Philosophical Association since its founding in 2003, and President from 2013-2016.
Vice President Emerita
Rosario Torres Guevara comes from Monterrey, NL, Mexico, where she completed her undergraduate studies in the school of Philosophy and Letters with a concentration on Applied Linguistics and Didactics from the Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon. Rosario continued her postgraduate studies at Teachers College, Columbia University where she obtained a Master’s degree in Linguistcs/TESOL and a Doctorate in International Educational Development with a concentration on Bilingualism and Interculturalism. Her research interests are Border Theory, Intercultural Education, Fanonian Pedagogy, and Decoloniality Studies. In addition to her work as a professor in various schools of New York, including CUNY City College, Columbia University and the Borough of Manhattan Community College, Rosario has worked as a volunteer and community leader in extracurricular school and community programs in New York as well as abroad. She has been listed as a community leader by the Mexican Consulate in New York City and has been a consultant in bilingual and intercultural educational programs that safeguard indigenous peoples in Argentina and Mexico. She is currently Assistant Professor of Critical Thinking and Writing in the Borough of Manhattan Community College in CUNY. She has been a member of the Caribbean Philosophical Association since 2005, secretary since 2010, Vice President from 2013-2016, and a member of the Executive Board since 2011.
SECRETARIES
David teaches in the philosophy department at the U. of San Francisco. There, he has served as a director of the Critical Diversity Studies Program (which unites the various Ethnic Studies programs and Gender and Sexualities studies), and directs a Global Humanities program (which foregrounds non-Western humanities traditions in the study of the humanities). His current research promotes East-South decolonial dialogue, focusing on shared political struggle and potential philosophical hybridity in the wider South or non-West. Or, borrowing from Du Bois: If Fanon sits with Confucius, do they wince or wince not? He also does work on Korean philosophy, which widens and complicates the received view of Asian philosophy. In particular, David has been interested in Donghak thought, Minjung thought, and the contemporary resurgence of Confucianism. He has also written on philosophy of race, specifically critiques of U.S. imperialism, anti-Asian racism, certain assimilation practices, xenophobia, and the like. He continues work on phenomenology-friendly moral psychology, especially in emotion theory, including the politics of emotion.
Juliet Hooker is Professor of Political Science at Brown University. She is a political theorist specializing in multiculturalism, racial justice, Latin American political thought, Black political thought, and Afro-descendant and indigenous politics in Latin America. Her publications include Race and the Politics of Solidarity (2009) and Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (2017). Her most recent publications are a co-edited special issue of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly on “After #Ferguson, After #Baltimore: The Challenge of Black Death and Black Life for Black Political Thought” and an article on “Black Protest/White Grievance: On the Problem of White Political Imaginations Not Shaped by Loss,” South Atlantic Quarterly 116, vol. 3 (2017): p. 483-504. Prof. Hooker has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the DuBois Institute for African American Research at Harvard, and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Kojo Koram is currently studying for PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London. His thesis will examine the position of the law on controlled drugs within the legacy of empire. Kojo also works as a legal advisor with Release. In this role, Kojo offers free legal advice at several legal outreach projects across London to clients who are engaged with drug and alcohol treatment centres.
Dana Francisco Miranda is a second-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He graduated from Bard College in 2014 with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy. His research interests include Africana philosophy, political theory, philsoophy of history and geography, existentialism, and such thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Amilcar Cabral, and Frantz Fanon. He has begun preliminary investigations into geopolitics and philosophical geography in hopes of better analyzing revolutionary politics alongside racial categorization, spatial division, and public violence.
Kris Sealey is an Associate Professor of Philosophy, and the director of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at Fairfield University She received both her M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from The University of Memphis, and does research in the areas of Continental Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy and Race Theory. She is the recipient of the first Anna Julia Cooper Writing Fellowship from The Pennsylvania State University, and has published articles on Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas and the philosophy of race in Levinas Studies, Research in Phenomenology, the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, as well as Continental Philosophy Review. Her book, Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre and the Question of Transcendence, was published in December 2013 with SUNY Press. Kris serves as the book review editor of the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy. She is also part of the Committee of Racial and Ethnic Diversity at the Society of Phenomenology and Existentialist Philosophy. Her current scholarly research agenda is in the areas of migration and diasporic identities.
Anastasia Valecce is an Assistant Professor of Hispanic studies in the Department of World Languages and Literature at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her PhD in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University. Her research interest focuses on Contemporary Caribbean Studies with a special focus on Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, Literature, Performance Studies, Queer Studies, Visual Culture, Film Studies, and pop culture. Her book manuscript explores the formation of the revolutionary ideology in the pre revolutionary period and early sixties Cuban cinematography and the contacts with Italian Neorealism. Anastasia's latest projects include a study on contemporary Puerto Rican independent cinema, and a research on the relationship between urban space, muralism, and citizenship in the Spanish Caribbean. Anastasia teaches at Spelman College courses on Spanish language, literature, and culture, and she also collaborates with the African Diaspora and the World Program and the Honors Program. Her awards and fellowships include the UNCF Mellon Faculty Residency Program.
Dr. Hanétha Vété-Congolo is Associate Professor of Romance Languages at Bowdoin College, Maine. She is affiliated to the Africana Studies Program, the Latin American Studies Program and the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Program of her institution. Dr. Vété-Congolo earns a Ph.D in general and comparative literature from the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane. Her scholarship focuses principally on Caribbean and African ideas, philosophy, literature and orality. Very interdisciplinary and comparative, her works pays particular attention to discourses by women and about women of the Caribbean, West and Central Africa. Her articles are published in refereed journals and anthologies such as among others, The CLR. James Journal: A Review of Caribbean Ideas, Ethiopiques. Revue négro-africaine de littérature et de philosophie, MaComère, Wadabagei, Anthurium, Présence francophone, Revue internationale de langue et de littérature, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Journal of Black Studies, Negritude: Legacy and Present Relevance, The Caribbean Woman Writer as Scholar, Postcolonial Text, Images de soi dans les sociétés postcoloniales, The Caribbean Woman as Scholar: Creating, Imagining, Theorizing, Marronnages et métissages dans l’œuvre de Suzanne Dracius, Les Cahiers du GRELCEF, Women in French or Erotique Caribbean: An Anthology of Caribbean Erotica. Dr. Vété-Congolo’s 2011 academic book, L’interoralité caribéenne: le mot conté de l’identité (Vers un traité d’esthétique caribéenne), was published with Éditions Universitaires Européennes. A second edition will be published in 2015 with Connaissance et Savoir. Her edited book, Le conte d’hier, aujourd’hui : Oralité et modernité was published with L’Harmattan in 2014. Her poetry collection, Avoir et Être : Ce que j’Ai, ce que je Suis was published with Le chasseur Abstrait publisher in 2009 while Mon parler de Guinée is forthcoming (2015) with L’Harmattan, coll. Poètes des cinq continents. More information on her faculty web page: http://www.bowdoin.edu/faculty/m/mvete/
FORMER EXECUTIVE OFFICERS
Jane Gordon, CPA President, 2013-2016
Rosario Torres-Guevara, CPA Vice President, 2013-2016
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, CPA President, 2008-2013
Michael Monahan, CPA Vice President, 2008-2013
Lewis Gordon, CPA President from 2003 to 2008
Clevis Headley, CPA Vice President, 2003-2008 and Co-Director of Publications, 2005-2010
Marina P. Banchetti-Robino, Co-Director of Publications and Translations, 2005-2010
Charles Nissim-Sabat, Legal Counsel, 2003-2010
FORMER SECRETARIES
Yomaira Figueroa, Secretary of Comparative Ethnic Studies and Chair of Afro-Diasporic Literatures
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Chair of the Initiative on Young Adult Philosophical Literature and Secretary of Engaged Arts and Post-Apocalyptic Philosophy and Law
Stephen Nathan Haymes, Secretary of International Studies Chair of Place-Based Education Initiatives
Jacqueline M. Martinez, Secretary of Phenomenology and Chair of the Initiative on Sexualities
Xhercis Méndez, Secretary of Decolonial Feminisms and Chair of the Initiative on Gender, Race, and Feminisms
Tacuma Peters, Secretary of Political Theory
George Belle, Secretary of Coordination for International Meeting (Barbados)
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Secretary of Hispanophone and Lusophone Caribbean and Member of Translations Committee
Tunde Bewaji, Secretary and Chair of African Relations and Philosophy
Brian Meeks, Secretary of Caribbean Thought (Center for Caribbean Thought at UWI-Mona)
B. Anthony Bogues, Secretary of Caribbean Political Thought and the Small Axe Collective and Chair of Africana Studies
Brinda Mehta, Secretary of the Indo-Caribbean
Richard Clarke, Secretary of Philosophy and Literature and Shibboleths: A Journal of Comparative Theory
Charles Mills, Secretary of Gender Studies
Henry Con, Secretary of Dutch Caribbean
Francois Naudillon, Secretary of Francophone Regions and Member of Committee on Translations
Kathryn Gines, Secretary of Africana Women in Philosophy
Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Secretary of Phenomenological Studies in the Caribbean
Gertrude Gonzalez de Allen, Secretary of Gender Studies and Chair of Committee on Women in Caribbean Philosophy
Alexis Nouss, Secretary of Francophone Regions and Member of Committee on Translations
Patrick Goodin, Secretary of Ancient Philosophy
Nkiru Nzegwu, Secretary of Western Africa and International Association of African Philosophy and Secretary of African Relations and Philosophy
Jane Gordon, Secretary of Political Theory
Sathya Rao, Secretary of Francophone Regions and Member of Committee on Translations
Stephen Haymes, Secretary of Philosophy of Education and Pedagogical Studies
Neil Roberts, Secretary of Social and Political Thought and Secretary of Graduate Students
Joan Jasak, Secretary of Technology and Scientific Media
Eddy Souffrant, Secretary of Francophone Caribbean
Chike Jeffers, Secretary of Graduate Students
Rosario Torres-Guevara, Secretary of Border Studies and Chair of Communications and Outreach Committee
Clarence Shole Johnson, Secretary of Philosophy and Human Rights
Celso Vargas, Secretary of Philosophical Studies of Science
Lisa Lowe, Secretary of Asian Caribbean
Kristin Waters, Secretary and Chair of Gender Studies in the Caribbean
Rozena Maart, Secretary of Psychoanalytical Studies and Black Consciousness
George Ciccariello-Maher, Secretary of Decolonial Thought
