Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús is Olden Street Professor of American Studies at Princeton University.

The title for this talk will be shared closer to the event date.

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús is a cultural and social anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research with Santería practitioners in Cuba and the United States, and police officers and communities of color affected by police violence in the United States. Her recent monograph, Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence and the Invention of a Disease (Duke University Press, 2024) examines the medicalization of police violence. Beliso-De Jesús unravels how “excited delirium syndrome,” a fabricated medical diagnosis, has been used to justify and erase police violence against Black and Brown communities, where she exposes the inextricable ties to the criminalization of Afro-Latiné religions. Her co-edited volume, The Anthropology of White Supremacy: A Reader (Princeton University Press, 2025), brings together anthropologists from across the globe to interrogate and dismantle the colonial, political, and economic structures of white supremacy, analyzing it as a global phenomenon.

Beliso-De Jesús’s work contributes to Afro-Latiné and transnational American Studies, studies of policing and militarization, anthropology of the African diaspora, religious studies, and transnational feminist theory. Her first book, Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion (Columbia University Press, 2015), won the 2016 Albert J. Raboteau Award for the Best Book in Africana Religions. She is currently completing a book, Zombie Patrol: Policing African Diaspora Religions which examines the criminalization of Black and Latiné religions, issues of animal sacrifice, policing, race and the constitutional question of religious freedom in the United States. Beliso-De Jesús has also spearheaded ethnographic research on police use of force in New Orleans, LA funded by the National Science Foundation.

Her academic publications include articles in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Signs, the Journal of Africana Religions, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the Annual Review of Anthropology. She came to Princeton after eight years at Harvard Divinity School where she was professor of African American Religions and a member of the Cuba Policy Committee at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, a faculty associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and on the executive board of the Safra Center for Ethics. Beliso-De Jesús is the co-founder and co-director of the Center on Transnational Policing (CTP) at Princeton University, and Editor-In-Chief of Transforming Anthropology, the flagship journal for the Association of Black Anthropologists. For over twenty years, she has worked with numerous grassroots, public policy, substance abuse, and other nonprofit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area advocating social justice issues, teen-parent support, alternative healing approaches, and empowerment strategies for youth of color.

The Bernd Lambert Memorial Lecture Series, inaugurated in 2017, was established by the Cornell University Department of Anthropology in honor of one of its distinguished emeriti, Bernd Lambert. A transnational refugee from the Holocaust and an ethnographer of the Pacific Islands, Lambert joined the Cornell faculty in 1964 and is remembered for his kind and generous presence. For over 50 years, his research and teaching ranged widely from issues of kinship, adoption, and social organization to myth and symbol. The Lambert lectures honor Prof. Lambert’s legacy by bringing similarly broad-minded scholars to the Cornell campus. Past lecturers have included Didier Fassin, Michelle Murphy, Lee D. Baker, Alessandro Duranti, Hugh Raffles, Sharika Thiranagama, and Yael Navaro.