Isabel Bradley

PhD candidate in Romance Studies, Duke University

I am a PhD candidate in Romance Studies at Duke. My research is regionally centered on the circum-Caribbean, where I study the emergence of counter-plantation worlds from nonextractive ecologies such as subsistence plots. I am interested in how relational ecological knowledge and its ties to Afro- and indigenous cosmologies can generate lines of flight and futures beyond the west’s present monohumanist episteme. I am drawn to the intersections of critical cartography, material culture, embodied knowledges, Black geographies, the beyond-human, digital methods, and decolonial praxis. My dissertation project will examine the subversion of plantation taxonomies occasioned by encounters between the manioc plant and its human cultivators, from early colonization to the Plantationocene present.