Patricia van Leeuwaarde Moonsammy is a Caribbeanist anthropologist at Dickinson College where she holds an appointment as Assistant Professor and Distinguished Chair in Africana Studies. Her ongoing research considers how performance illuminates the politics of race, ethnicity and mixing, citizenship and nationalism, cultural production, and anticolonial and social justice movements in the Caribbean and wider African Diaspora.

Her primary affiliation at Duke will be in Cultural Anthropology, with links to African and African American Studies, Music, and the Center for Documentary Studies. She will be working on two interrelated projects focusing on rapso, a Trinidadian musical genre that combines the oral tradition with revolutionary ideology. The first is the manuscript of her forthcoming book, Rapso and Revolution: Musical Performance, Activism, and the Postcolonial Subject in Trinidad. The second is a 30-minute video short of a documentary film entitled Rapso Chants.

Beyond informing her current scholarly projects, her interactions at Duke will also enrich an ongoing pedagogical and scholarly interest—the development of a Caribbean Arts Oral History Digital Archive. The archive will provide opportunities for Dickinson students to collect and analyze data that documents the socio-cultural environment in which Caribbean art is produced, its historical and ongoing importance as a vehicle of social and political critique, and the life stories and motivations of the artists who create it. The archive will be particularly valuable in providing linking Caribbean art with the life story narratives of the producers of the art, digitally preserving this important cultural history, and making these resources widely available to those interested in Caribbean society and cultural production.