James Padilioni
Visiting Assistant Professor
On Leave - Spring
Religion
Environmental Studies
Contact
James’ research and teaching foreground African Diasporic ritual and performative cultures, ancestral veneration and spirit liturgical traditions, and ontologies and ecologies of Blackness, with a focus in Afro-Latinx folk Catholicism, Black Atlantic herbalism and pharmacopeia, and ecocritical healing justice movements. James is a 2023-24 American Council for Learned Societies fellow. His forthcoming book, To Ask Infinity Some Questions: San Martín de Porres and the Hagiographic Mysteries of Black Florida (Fordham Univ. Press), centers the figure of San Martín de Porres (1579-1639), the first Catholic saint of African descent born in the Americas, and explores the various ways Florida’s Diasporic communities harness ritual performance to invoke Martín’s sensible presence in their everyday endeavors "to ask infinity some questions" about the mysterious and sublime nature of Black Diasporic being. James' interdisciplinary scholarship has appeared in The Black Scholar, U.S. Catholic Historian, Environment and Society, and Interfere: Journal for Critical Thought and Radical Politics, and he engages public scholarship as a co-host of the Always Already critical theory podcast.
