Dr. Jorge Duany has been invited to serve on the oral examination committee for Jennifer Cearns' doctoral dissertation in anthropology. The other committee members are Drs. Daniel Miller (principal supervisor), Mette Berg (secondary supervisor), and Martin Holbraad (internal coexaminer), all at the Department of Anthropology, University College London. The oral examination is scheduled for Friday, March 27, 2020 at the University College London.
The title of Ms. Cearns' thesis is "'The Mula Ring': Material Flows of Circulation through the Cuban World." Her research follows material and digital flows across borders and diasporas in the Americas moving between capitalism and socialism, principally between Havana and Miami, but also through communities in Guyana, Panama, and Mexico. She has tracked the movements of smugglers, cremated remains, tobacco, mp3s, clothing, antiques, and medicines (amongst other things) as they move back and forth, and her ethnographic research considers how such items bestow a "Cuban identity" upon the different communities they circulate between.
Jennifer Cearns is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University College of London. She earned her master's degree (with distinction) in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford. She also holds a B.A. (with distinction) in English and Modern Languages from Oxford. She was a Visiting Scholar at FIU's Cuban Research Institute during the academic year 2017–18.
Dr. Jorge Duany is Director of the Cuban Research Institute and Professor of Anthropology at Florida International University. He has published extensively about migration, ethnicity, race, nationalism, and transnationalism in Cuba, the Caribbean, and the United States. His latest book is Picturing Cuba: Art, Culture, and Identity on the Island and in the Diaspora (2019).
