Adrienne Rooney is Assistant Professor of Visual and Material Culture at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Before joining the VU, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester in New York. She obtained her PhD in Art History, with certificates in African and African American Studies and Critical and Cultural Theory, at Rice University in Houston, Texas, after working for several years as a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

Most broadly put, her work focuses on relationships between (de)colonization and visual and material culture in the Americas, particularly in the wider Caribbean. Her writing primarily foregrounds Caribbean artistic and exhibition practices, counter-geographies, and intellectual thought while wrestling with the centuries-long story of cultural violence and defiance in contact zones established by colonization and the plantation economy. She also has interests in the politics of repatriation and the archive, social justice and visual culture, and connections between racial capitalism, ideas about art and aesthetics, and Western conceptions of modernity. Her work on these topics is indebted to Caribbean intellectual thought, Black Studies, and decolonial theory.

She is currently working on her first book project, based on her award-winning PhD dissertation, A Worldbuilding Moment: Aesthetics and Economics in the Caribbean Festival of Arts’ (Carifesta) Revolutionary Era, 1966-1981, the first academic monograph devoted to this sweeping cultural expression of the dream to unify a region divided by colonial empire. In addition to chapters and articles relating to Carifesta, she will soon publish an essay on a confluence of anticolonial protest, aesthetic theory, and artistic practice in Jamaica’s 1970.

Beyond her written scholarship, criticism, and public talks, she centers collaborative public history projects. Stemming from her research on Carifesta, she co-organized the three-day international symposium The Inaugural Caribbean Festival of Arts as Prism: 20th Century Festivals in the Multilingual Caribbean (2022), which was held as part of the Guyana Cultural Association of New York, Inc.’s Annual Guyana Folk Festival. The symposium also launched the Digital Archive of Guyanese and Caribbean Festivals, Culture and Literature, an archival hub at the University of Guyana for materials from and oral histories of Carifesta and beyond. She is also the co-founder and co-leader of the Racial Geography Project, a research collective of the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice at Rice University.

She teaches for the bachelor's program of Media, Art, Design and Architecture (MKDA), the master's program of Arts & Culture, and the research master in Humanities.

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