Katherine Smith

Culture
Arts
Religion of Haiti

Katherine’s work has been published in the books Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing, Kanaval! Vodou, Politics, and Revolution in the Streets of Haiti, In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st Century Haitian Art and in the journals Southern Quarterly, e-misférica, and Nova Religio. Katherine has been a part of the curatorial team of two major exhibitions of Haitian art: Reframing Haiti: Art, History, and Performativity at Brown University and In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st Century Haitian Art at the UCLA Fowler Museum.

Katherine Smith is a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. Through extensive ethnographic research, Katherine examines historical transformations of the trickster spirit Gede in the visual and embodied culture of Vodou. Before coming to NYU, she spent two years at Brown University as a Mellon-Cogut Postdoctoral Fellow in Africana Studies and History of Art and Architecture. She completed her doctorate at UCLA with a dissertation on displacement, death, and regeneration in contemporary Haiti. She is presently revising her dissertation for publication as a book.

Courses Taught at NYU

Haiti Today: Politics, Culture, Crisis
Topics: Death in the Americas
Topics: Black Atlantic Religions