Carine Schermann

Carine Schermann (Ph.D., Florida State University) specializes in Francophone and Caribbean Studies, with research interests in visual cultures of the Black Atlantic, environmental humanities, border studies, and Black feminist thought. Her interdisciplinary and multilingual work brings literature into conversation with visual art, film, and ethnography. Her current book project, Black Ayiti: Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the Politics of Transformation, examines cultural production from both sides of the Haitian-Dominican border from the 1990s to the present, asking how artists and writers mobilize figures of more-than-human transformation as strategies of self-making that unsettle colonial and national frameworks. Through these practices, the project explores how creators reimagine the island of Ayiti and envision alternative possibilities for belonging and living together. Her scholarship has appeared in L’Esprit créateur, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and Francosphères, and is forthcoming in Small Axe; and has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship (2023-24) and an African and African Diaspora Studies Dissertation Fellowship at Boston College (2025-26).

Her work also extends into museums and public humanities, with a particular interest in how Caribbean art can create spaces for collective interpretation and engagement. She developed “Untold Stories: A Glimpse of the Caribbean through Haitian Art” (2025-26), a collaborative teaching and exhibition project with Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art and the University of Massachusetts Lowell that invited students to research and produce multilingual, public-facing interpretations of a rarely displayed collection of Haitian art. She also contributed to Homo Sargassum (2025), an exhibition and public program exploring the ecological and cultural implications of sargassum across the Caribbean.

Before pursuing her Ph.D., Carine lived in Port-au-Prince for seven years, where she worked in human rights education and cultural programming at Fondasyon Konesans ak Libète (FOKAL) and co-founded the multidisciplinary Haitian journal Trois/Cent/Soixante. Her continued engagement with Haiti informs her scholarship and her collaborative approach to research. In 2025-26, she participated in a community-engaged research project in Port-au-Prince and Les Cayes (Haiti) examining how the performance arts foster social ties and forms of community life in times shaped by uncertainty (Fabrique des Arts/INSUCO).

Selected publications:

Schermann, C. “How to Fashion Freedom: Performing the Haitian Revolution in Tessa Mars’s Afrotopian Futures.” Francosphères, vol. 15, no. 1, June 2026. https://doi.org/10.3828/franc.2026.1
Schermann, C. “Mafalda Mondestin’s Secret Tropical Garden: Looking at the Island from the Dominican Republic. An Interview.” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, “Gender Articulated: Visual Language & the Un/Seeable Self,” issue 16, May 2026. https://uwi.academia.edu/CRGSUWI
Joos, Vincent, T. Lomeli, & C. Schermann. “Pathologizing and Controlling Haitian Bodies: The U.S. Border through Discrimination, Incarceration, and Deportation.” Journal of Latino/Latin American Studies, vol. 14, no.1, Oct. 2025, pp.74-100. https://doi.org/10.18085/1549-9502.2025.05.OR.008
Schermann, C. “Casser les murs : Entretien avec Rodney Saint-Eloi.” L’esprit Créateur, vol. 65, no. 3, Sept. 2025, pp. 103-15. https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2025.a975171