Faculty » Paul Ryer
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Assistant Professor Office: 1320A Watkins Hall |
Professor Ryer comes to UCR from Mount Holyoke College. Trained as a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago, he has conducted research in Cuba, where he has been affiliated with the University of Havana, and its diaspora. His dissertation research rethinks the imagined geographies of cubanidad, or Cubanness, arguing that in the Cuban vernacular, cubanidad rests uneasily between the scarcities of socialism and the consumer goods of the West, and that its contradictions and limits are most starkly exposed by the experiences and positioning of resident African-born, Cuban-educated students. Currently, his research follows such students as they migrate again, forging new diasporas and fashioning hybridized homelands.