Rosalind Morris, Columbia University -

Rosalind C. Morris is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She has written

widely on questions of representation, value, and power in the age of mass media,

focusing her ethnographic research in South Africa and mainland Southeast Asia. Her

most recent book is The Returns of Fetishism: Charles de Brosses and the Afterlives of an

Idea (with Daniel H. Leonard, 2017).  She has also collaborated on 2 books with the South African artist William Kentridge, and is currently working as the writer and director on a documentary film about informal gold mining in South Africa, entitled We are Zama Zama.

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Paper: Wagering Translation in the Underground: Gold, Money, and the Task of Communication in Deindustrializing South Africa

 

 

Robin Derby, University of California, Los Angeles -

Lauren (Robin) Derby is associate professor of Latin American history at UCLA.  Her research has treated dictatorship and everyday life, the long durée social history of the Haitian and Dominican border, and how notions of race, national identity and witchcraft have been articulated in popular media such as rumor, food and animals. Her publications include the prize- winning The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo; (co-editor) Activating the Past:  History and Memory in the Black Atlantic World; (co-editor) The Dominican Republic Reader and articles on Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. Her current book project, which considers werewolves in light of the ‘animal turn’ is based on oral testimony of demonic animal apparitions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic and is entitled Werewolves and other Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands.

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Paper: Stealing the Citadelle: Icons of Nationhood and Memories of Theft in Haitian Accounts of Kout Kouto