James Padilioni

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 planetary ethics and ecocritical healing justice movements. James was a 2023-24 American Council for Learned Societies fellow during which time he completed his forthcoming book, To Ask Infinity Some Questions: San Martín de Porres and the Hagiographic Mysteries of Black Florida (Fordham Univ. Press), which 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 and folk cultural performances 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 is co-editor of Catholic Re-Visions, a peer-reviewed blog hosted by the Political Theology Network at Villanova University, and is co-host of the Always Already critical theory podcast. 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.