Congratulations to Adrienne Rooney for being awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies (FDI), which is part of the Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester!
Adrienne studies twentieth-century art and (visual) culture in the Americas, with a focus on the Circum-Caribbean. She completed her dissertation, “A Worldbuilding Moment: Aesthetics and Economics in the Caribbean Festival of Arts’ Revolutionary Era, 1966-1981,” this summer under her advisor Dr. Fabiola López-Durán. Her dissertation, the first book-length academic study of the Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta)—an initiative that has embodied Caribbean integration more fully than political or economic efforts—attends to the conceptualization of this monumental, multilingual, ongoing festival and the (visual) culture foregrounded in its first four iterations in Guyana, Jamaica, Cuba, and Barbados.