Professor Solimar Otero's recent lecture, “Archives of Conjure: Spirits, Art, and Materiality" is now online.   Find it here. 

Dr. Otero also was interviewed for the Latin@ Stories podcast. In this episode, she talks about her research on gender, sexuality, Afro-Caribbean spirituality, and Yoruba traditional religion in folklore. Listen to this episode on the Latin@ Stories podcast here. 

Abstract: In her January 31, 2022 presentation, based on her book Archives of Conjure, Professor Solimar Otero explored how Afrolatinx spirits guide collaborative spiritual-scholarly activist work through rituals and the creation of material culture. By examining spirit mediumship through a Caribbean cross-cultural poetics, she showed how divinities and ancestors serve as active agents in shaping the experiences of gender, sexuality, and race in ethnography, archives, and literature.

Solimar Otero is Professor of Folklore in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology; the Director of the Folklore Institute; and the editor of the Journal of Folklore Research at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research centers on gender, sexuality, Afro-Caribbean spirituality, and Yoruba traditional religion in folklore, literature, and ethnography.