Jerry Philogene is Associate Professor in American Studies at Dickinson College, with departmental affiliations in Africana Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Latin American Studies. Her teaching and scholarship are interdisciplinary and include diaspora and transnational studies, critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, art history, and visual culture. Her work reflects a broad interest in exploring connections across boundaries of all kinds: national and linguistic, social, racial, and class, as well as boundaries across academic disciplines.

The focus of her fellowship year is a book manuscript, The Socially Dead and Improbable Citizen: Theorizing Visual Transformations of Haitian Citizenship. In it, she employs the methodologies of African diaspora studies and visual culture studies to examine the connections between imagery, citizenship, and social death, asking three fundamental questions: What are the symbiotic relationships between subjectivity and iconography? How should we read histories presented in images and imaging practices? How are these imaging practices written on the body? The argument is presented in four distinct chapters, covering painting, photography, film, and comics. Together, these chapters offer the perfect lens through which to reflect on Haiti as part of a Black Atlantic visual aesthetic with a long tradition of resistance and liberatory practices.

She is also eager to share with the Duke community her work examining black visual culture and aesthetics within a larger global frame, including her recent studies of the films of Raoul Peck and art works of Jean-Ulrick Désert, two Haiti-born artists who have spent their formative adult years living and working in Europe and Africa.