Congratulations to Louis Philippe Römer, Winner of the 2026-2027 Wenner-Gren Fellowship in Anthropology and Black Experiences!
The purpose of this fellowship is to expand the anthropological conversation and build capacity in anthropology as a career and field of study, amplifying perspectives previously underrepresented in the discipline. This year’s winner is Louis Philippe Römer for his project, Strategic Ambiguities: Race, Class, and Populism on the Caribbean Airwaves.
Strategic Ambiguities: Race, Class, and Populism on the Caribbean Airwaves is a study of populist discourse and its use of race and class to signify political affinities and enmities on political talk radio. Strategic Ambiguities moves beyond stale dichotomies that surround race and class as explanations for populism and instead examines on how populist discourse redefines race and class categories.
Based on a long-term ethnographic research project in Curaçao—an autonomous territory of the Netherlands in the Caribbean—on the production, consumption, and discursive content of talk radio programs, Strategic Ambiguities engages with semiotic and linguistic anthropology, studies of populism, and the anthropology of the future to approach politics as a creative activity that generates alternative vocabularies and narratives through which the public understands their present and future.
Louis Römer is a linguistic and political anthropologist whose research and teaching interests include the anthropology of media, digital anthropology, decolonization, Caribbean studies, and Africana studies. His recent publications include “Rituals of Mourning and the Poetics of Papiamentu Talk Radio,” which was a chapter in the edited volume Handbook of Ritual Language (Oxford, 2024). His research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Cultuurfonds in the Netherlands. He also maintains an active profile as a public scholar, and his writing has appeared in venues such as the Boston Review, Al Jazeera English, and Somatosphere.
Römer has an ongoing interest in elevating perspectives from Afro-Diasporic scholars based in Latin America and the Caribbean, which has resulted in publications such as his recent contribution to the edited volume Handbook of Dutch Caribbean Gender Studies (Brill, 2024), “Forma Di Papia (Ways of Speaking) in the Dutch Caribbean and Their Relevance for the Study of Gender and Sexuality,” a chapter that explains the intellectual contributions of Elis Juliana, a Curaçaoan artist, ethnologist, and folklorist whose work has only appeared in Papiamentu, to an Anglophone audience.
Currently, Römer is Lecturer of Anthropology at Vassar College and served as Director of Africana Studies at Vassar College from 2025 to 2026.