James Padilioni
Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion
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James’ research and teaching foreground African Diasporic ritual and performative cultures, ontologies of Blackness, and deep ecology studies, with a focus in Black and Afro-Latinx folk Catholicism, Black Atlantic herbalism and pharmacopeia, and ancestral veneration and ecstatic-spirit liturgical traditions. His forthcoming book, To Ask Infinity Some Questions: San Martín de Porres and the Hagiographic Mysteries of Black Florida, centers the figure of San Martín de Porres (1579-1639), the first Catholic saint of African descent born in the Americas, and explores the convergent and divergent ways Florida’s Black 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 being in an antiblack world. James' scholarship has appeared in U.S. Catholic Historian, Interfere: Journal for Critical Thought and Radical Politics, and he engages in public scholarship as a co-host of the Always Already critical theory podcast and contributor at Black Perspectives, the digital platform of the African-American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS).
