Rachel earned her Ph.D. in English at Stony Brook University in May 2011.  Her dissertation, New World Poetics: Conjoining Migratory, Minor and Fragmented Desires for Place in Latina/o and Caribbean Literature, re-theorizes Latina/o Poetics in a comparative context.  It focuses on the figure of The Cry that burst with the collapse of the Plantation throughout the New World, and sustains its vocative and corporeal intensity in contemporary Latina/o, Caribbean, Black Diasporic and Latin American poetic, narrative, musical and cinematic forms.  She is invested in re-formulating a persistent question posed by philosophy, What do poets do?, through variations on the statement: the world cannot do without them, for we inhabit a poetic and multilingual world.

An essay on the Caribbean poets José Lezama Lima and Derek Walcott ("The Orphic Condition of José Lezama Lima, Derek Walcott, and New World Poetics") is forthcoming in Sargasso; she has published an essay on Puerto Rican art in the International Journal of the Arts in Society.  Her poetry has been published bilingually in Cuba, and she continues to ply the trade.  Currently, she is building on her dissertation towards her first book on Latina/o, Caribbean and New World Poetics, and working on several essays (about how music moves the body in the works of Pedro Pietri, Miguel Algarín and James Baldwin; on the figure of the "melancholic migrant" in Junot Díaz's and Richard Rodriguez's works; and an argument that Contemporary Cuban Cinema and Fiction resist the stagnated image that the island is but a place of stasis).  She imagines future projects on the poetry of Édouard Glissant, translating the poetry of Monchoachi into English, and another project on Cuban Cinema inflected by the reality of the Revolution's transition in relation to global capital.

This Spring, she is teaching courses on Caribbean Poetry and Cinema and Cinema of the Cuban Revolution. She is also the curator of the Cuban Revolutionary Cinema mini-series at Film@International House: 

http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/events/2012/February/CubanRevolutionaryCinemaMemoriasdelsubdesarrollo