Dr. Lauren (Robin) Derby’s 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, the co-authored Terreur de frontière: le massacre des Haïtiens en République dominicaine en 1937 (Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 2021) and the co-edited Dominican Republic Reader (Duke University Press, 2014). She is Bradford Burns Chair of Latin American history at UCLA where she teaches courses on modern Latin America and Caribbean history, cultural history and food studies.

The focus of today’s conversation is her latest monograph, Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands (Duke University Press, 2025). In this work, Dr. Derby examines storytelling traditions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, centering on shape-shifting spirit figures known as baka or bacá, and exploring how they embody layered histories of race, religion, repression, and resistance.

Dr. Chelsi West Ohueri is a sociocultural anthropologist and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research throughout Albania and the Balkan region, and in the US South.

In today’s conversation, we explore her book Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife. Through the unexpected lens of Albania, a small, formerly communist country in Southeast Europe, the work offers powerful insights into broader understandings of race in a global context.

Dr. Samuele Collu is an Assistant Professor of Medical and Psychological Anthropology at McGill University. His research examines the entanglement between psychic life, therapeutic practices, and digital devices. He is currently completing Dreams I Scroll Through, an experimental ethnography immersing the reader in a (mildly psychedelic) social media binge-scroll. Collu is also working on a project titled “Force and Form,” which focuses on learning, trauma, and internal alchemy practices in Montréal.

The topic for today's conversation is his first book, Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition, came out with Duke University Press this year (2026). Written in an experimental and literary style that moves fluidly between the academic, the personal, and their uncanny in-betweens, Into the Loop offers a unique window into the repetitive cycles that shape our most intimate relationships and the possibilities for transformation within them.