Congratulations to N. Fadeke Castor, Winner of the 2025-2026 Wenner-Gren Fellowship in Anthropology and Black Experiences!
The School for Advanced Research (SAR), in Santa Fe, New Mexico, administers the Wenner-Gren Fellowship in Anthropology and Black Experiences in collaboration with the Foundation. 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 N. Fadeke Castor, for their project, "Black Spirits Matter: Locating Spaces of Spiritual Marronage."
Project Description:
In their book project Dr. Castor explores how we can envision – and reach – a liberated future by centering Afro-Indigenous spirituality and ways of knowing. She locates ways they help us to imagine an ‘otherwise’ future where we can walk in the world with each other as kin, as relations, that are always already free through engagements with sacred praxis and the dynamics of fugitivity and resistance. In their project, they bring together Black feminist ethnographic methodologies grounded in Cultural Anthropology with Native American and Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Religious Studies to address questions raised by the multiple crises of the current moment (from climate change to racial violence).
Bio:
Fadeke Castor (she/they) is a Black Feminist ethnographer and African diaspora studies scholar, with interests in religion, race, performance and the intersectional politics of decolonization. She is the award-winning author of Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifá in Trinidad (Duke University Press, 2017; Clifford Geertz Prize, 2018), which illuminates how Trinidad Ifá/Orisha practitioners, following the political activism and social upheaval of the 1970s Black Power Revolution, shaped local, national, and transnational modes of belonging.
Dr. Castor’s research has been supported, in part, by Fulbright-Hays and Wenner-Gren grants and Gaius Bolin and Mellon fellowships. Their work can be found in Cultural Anthropology, Fieldwork in Religion, Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, The Black Scholar and the Journal of World Popular Music. Her current research focuses on an exploration of African/Indigenous ways of knowing and systems of belonging as creating spaces that can shift our centers of being towards collective care, healing, and social transformation. As part of this larger project, they are building Digital Ancestral Altars: Remembrances of Trinidad Ifá/Orisha Elders a digital multi-modal repository and archive, to commemorate Trinidad’s ancestral Ifá/Orisha elders (funded by a Community Stories grant from The Crossroads Project, Princeton University and a Community Collaboration Grant from Northeastern’s NULab).
Currently, Dr. Castor is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Northeastern University, where they are affiliated with NULab or Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science, Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies, Sociology and Anthropology, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is an affiliate of The Crossroads Project on Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures at Princeton University and the Habitable Air: Urban Inequality in the Time of Climate Change Project at the University of Bergen (Norway). Recently, Dr. Castor was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School (2022-23).