Mayra Rivera Rivera

Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies

Education

BS ChE, University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez
MTS, PhD, Drew University

Profile

Mayra Rivera is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies at Harvard University. She is also chair of the standing Committee on Ethnicity Migration Rights and a faculty member in Harvard’s doctoral program in American Studies. She is vice president of the American Academy of Religion.

Rivera works at the intersections between continental philosophy of religion, literature, and theories of coloniality, race and gender—with particular attention to Caribbean postcolonial thought. Her research explores the relationship between discursive and material dimensions in shaping human embodiment. Her book, The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (2007), explores the relationship between models of divine otherness and ideas about interhuman difference. She is also co-editor, with Stephen Moore, of Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology (2010) and, with Catherine Keller and Michael Nausner, of Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire (2004). Her most recent book, Poetics of the Flesh (2015), analyzes theological, philosophical, and political descriptions of “flesh” as metaphors for understanding how social discourses materialize in human bodies.

Rivera is currently developing a project that explores narratives of catastrophe and/as Genesis in twentieth-century Caribbean writing. She is also at work on a book examining the role of religion in the constitution of the human in the works of Caribbean writer and theorist Sylvia Wynter.

Full CV