Adriana Garriga-López

Adriana Garriga-López, Ph.D is Associate Professor and Chair of the Anthropology and Sociology Department of Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She holds Ph.D. (2010), M.Phil. (2006) and MA (2003) degrees in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University. Adriana was also a Ph.D. student in the History of Consciousness Board of the University of California in Santa Cruz between 2000-2002, under the supervision of Donna Haraway. She holds a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology and Comparative Literature from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (2001,) where she co-founded LLEGO! (The Queer People of Color Union of Rutgers University.) While on sabbatical, she was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s Anthropology Department in the fall of 2016 and at the University of Puerto Rico’s Institute for Caribbean Studies in spring of 2017.

Adriana’s ethnographic research focuses on contagious disease and public health cultures in Puerto Rico, with an emphasis on community health activism and on the island’s political context. Adriana’s work examines the ways that epidemics reveal in stark detail the health effects of colonialism in Puerto Rico. She is particularly interested in critical appraisals of the racialized and gendered politics of debt and imperialism and how these articulate with variegated biopolitical regimes on and off the island. More broadly, she studies and teaches about the racial, cultural, and sexual politics of health in the Caribbean, the U.S., and Latin America and has conducted research on bubonic plague, hookworm, bilharzia, ebola, yellow fever, dengue, HIV/AIDS, chinkungunya, and zika. She is currently editing a book manuscript on “the coloniality of health in Puerto Rico,” which is based in part on doctoral research on HIV/AIDS activism.

Adriana’s work has been published in New Proposals: A Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry and in Sargasso: Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, & Culture. She has two forthcoming publications in two separate anthologies: one a chapter on the coloniality of addiction in Puerto Rico in an anthology called Ethnographies of US Empire (edited by John Collins and Carole McGranahan, under review at Duke University Press); and another chapter called Contested Sovereignties: Puerto Rico and American Samoa, co-authored with Lisa Uperesa as part of an anthology called Sovereign Acts, (edited by Frances Negrón-Muntaner), which is in production at the University of Arizona Press.

In addition to her academic writing, Garriga-López publishes poetry and short fiction in English and Spanish. Her creative work has appeared in The New Engagement, Cruce, 80 Grados, Sargasso, Ad Hoc, African Writing, The Columbia Review, Beyond Polarities, and Piso 13. She is also a performance artist, muralist, and soprano.