SC Connecticut News

By Michaela Herrmann

Every year, Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences hires numerous scholars across various academic departments. This series profiles six new faculty members joining the FAS in the 2024-25 academic year, highlighting their achievements, research ambitions, and teaching plans.

Christen Smith, a sociocultural anthropologist, focuses on how performance shapes communities. Her research centers on the African diaspora in Brazil, studying the impact of violent policing on Black communities and their responses. Her first book, "Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil," explores how these communities use performance to address racism and anti-Blackness. “To use a more jargon-y term,” Smith says, “my first book focused on the necropolitics of the state as a kind of performance—how we can think of police violence as its own theatrical dance that the state performs to perpetuate forms of inequality, marginalization, and abjection.”

Smith joins Yale as an Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies. She hopes her joint appointment will foster significant collaborations. “I have always been a fan of the intersections between African American Studies and Anthropology at Yale,” she notes.

A prolific scholar with three published books and a fourth on the way, Smith's research addresses police violence's impact on Black communities and the erasure of Black women's intellectual contributions. During her research for "Afro-Paradise," she observed that police violence significantly affects Black women. “Black women often die in the months and weeks after their family members have been killed,” she explains.

Smith's current book project, "Frequency: Black Women in the Atlantic," examines the lingering effects—or sequelae—of police violence on Black women in Brazil and the United States. “‘Sequelae’ is a word that basically means a disease that you develop as a result of another injury or disease,” Smith explains.

In addition to her work on state violence, Smith has explored Black intellectual creativity through two other books: "The Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento" (2023) and "Black Feminist Constellations: Dialogue and Translation Across the Americas" (2023). The former presents Nascimento’s work to an English-speaking audience while situating it within the Black radical tradition. The latter emerged from a conference co-hosted by Smith in 2020.

Smith also founded Cite Black Women in 2017 to raise awareness about citational erasure. The movement includes social media campaigns, special journal issues, and a podcast.

At Yale, Smith looks forward to developing new classes based on student interests. She expresses excitement about integrating into Yale’s community both academically and personally.

“It might sound so mundane,” she says, “but I’m really looking forward to hiking East Rock.”