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.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.

Today’s discussion is with Don Deere, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. He has published a number of articles in key journals and edited collections, is the co-translator of Santiago Castro-Gómez’s Zero-Point Hubris: Science, Race, and Enlightenment in 18th-Century Latin America, and is the author of The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space, published in 2026 on Duke University Press as part of their series Radical Américas, which is the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we explore the importance of Latin American theorists for philosophy and philosophers, the challenge of thinking across multiple geographies, and the legacy of colonialism in our understanding of spatiality, place, and the meaning of modernity.

Dr. Jonathan Howard is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English at Yale University. His research and teaching broadly interrogate western ideas about race and nature while also exploring black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice. His first book, Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness, undertakes a black ecocritical study of the “deep” as the diffuse subtext of African American literature. It argues that blackness dawns in Middle Passage as an ongoing inhabitation of the deep, which is most fully apprehended not as social death but ecological life.

Along with dozens of scholarly articles and a handful of edited books and journal issues, he is the author of seven books: Sensibility and Singularity (2001), Godard Between Identity and Difference (2008), Levinas and the Postcolonial (2012), Glissant and the Middle Passage (2019), and three recent books that are the occasion for our conversation, Atlantic Theory (2025), So Unimaginable a Price (2026) and At the Margins of Nihilism (2026). He is also the co-editor with Michael Sawyer of Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy and co-host of both The Black Studies Podcast and Conversations in Atlantic Theory.

In today’s conversation, we explore Dr. Drabinski’s three latest monographs: In Atlantic Theory, where he traces the enduring legacies of slavery and colonialism while offering a comparative account of critical thought across the Atlantic world. In So Unimaginable a Price, he turns to James Baldwin, situating his work within a broader mid-century Atlantic context and placing it in dialogue with thinkers across the Caribbean and Africa.

Finally, in At the Margins of Nihilism, he develops a theoretical framework through a comparative reading of Jacques Derrida and Orlando Patterson, drawing on figures such as Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Baldwin to examine how different forms of nihilism operate as closed systems, and how they are unsettled through vernacular practices of life and refusal.

Professor Alejandro Luis Madrid is the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard University. He is a cultural theorist of sound and music working in Latin American and Latinx studies. Among other honors, he has received the Humboldt Research Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dent Medal, the Premio de Musicología Casa de las Américas, and awards from the American Musicological Society, the Latin American Studies Association, ASCAP, IASPM, and the Society for Ethnomusicology. Professor Madrid is sought after as an expert commentator by national and international media outlets, including Time Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Agence France-Presse, the BBC, Public Radio International, and Radio Uruguay (SODRE). He acted as music advisor to Welsh filmmaker Peter Greenaway, whose movie, Eisenstein in Guanajuato, is set in early 1930s Mexico.

In today’s conversation, we discuss his latest monograph, The Archive and the Aural City. Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening (Duke University Press, 2025) where he examines sound archives and the production and circulation of knowledge at the aural turn.

Dr. Akane Kanai is a feminist cultural studies scholar, currently based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. She researches the relational politics of identity, with a focus on how the emotional life of social media informs cultures of everyday knowledge. Her previous book, Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture, contributed a critique of relatability in theorizing the everyday regulation of emotion for young women online. Prior to joining Warwick in 2025, she was a senior research fellow at Monash University in Melbourne (Naarm), Australia.

In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph The New Politics of Online Feminism, where she argues that for young feminists online culture often poses more dilemmas than it solves. Dr. Kanai foregrounds the importance of moving beyond the polarities of correct and incorrect feeling to enable the everyday practices of listening to and learning about experience and difference.