Karma Frierson
she/her/hers
Assistant Professor of Black Studies
PhD, University of Chicago
Office Hours: By appointment
Biography
Karma Frierson (she/her) is an assistant professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. Dr. Frierson is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the significance of Blackness in identity formation, place-making, and cultural practice in Mexico.
She earned her doctoral degree in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the University of Rochester, Dr. Frierson was an assistant professor in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She was also the inaugural postdoctoral associate with the Center for Latin American Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Research Overview
Dr. Frierson’s first book, Local Color: Race, Roots, and Reputation in Cotemporary Veracruz, Mexico (under contract with the University of California Press) is an ethnographic exploration of how locals in the Gulf Coast port city of Veracruz rehearse and reiterate their idea of Blackness within the hegemonic discourse of mestizaje. It argues that, through cultural programming and practices such as music and dance, locals have come to understand their Afro-Caribbean heritage as collective, distinctive, and inalienable, but not generative of self-identification as Black or Afro-Mexican. Her next project, “Black Americans and the Mexican Dream” explores how African-American expatriates are fashioning Mexico as a viable home and refuge from racial within the context of Afro-Mexicans’ efforts to build on their recent constitutional recognition.
Dr. Frierson’s work has been supported by the ACLS/Marwan M. and Ute Kraidy Centennial Fellowship in the Study of the Arab World and Latin America, the COMEXUS Fulbright-García Robles Scholarship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Tinker Field Research Grant program, and the SSRC-Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and Graduate Initiatives Program.
Research Interests
- Afro-Latin America
- Cultural Politics of Leisure
- Processes of Identification