© photo by Jeff Day

Dylon Robbins

Dylon Robbins

Faculty Fellow

Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Faculty of Arts & Science

Prof. Robbins has published and carried out research on Cuban cinema, Walt Disney and Sergei Eisenstein, as well as on visual culture and war in the United States in 1898. His translations of essays by the Brazilian philosopher Marilena Chaui appear in the English-language anthology of her work Between Conformity and Resistance: Essays on Politics, Culture, and the State published by Palgrave Macmillan. His current book project traces the intellectual history of spirit possession and trance in Brazil and its relationship to different models of political subjectivity through an analysis of medical accounts of a 19th-century dancing mania, criminal cases related to the persecution of hypnotists, Brazilian theories of the trance-inducing effects of certain rhythms, and copyright cases involving texts authored by spirit mediums.