James P. Padilioni, Jr.

James P. Padilioni, Jr. serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Swarthmore College, with cross-disciplinary affiliations in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program and Environmental Studies Program.

His research foregrounds African Diasporic ritual and performative cultures, ancestral veneration and spirit liturgical traditions, and ontologies and ecologies of Blackness. With a focus on Afro-Latinx folk Catholicism, Black Atlantic herbalism and pharmacopeia, and ecocritical healing justice movements, his work examines how Black communities harness ritual performance to navigate existence in the African Diaspora.

Dr. Padilioni's scholarly contributions include the forthcoming book To Ask Infinity Some Questions: San Martín de Porres and the Hagiographic Mysteries of Black Florida (Fordham University Press), which centers on San Martín de Porres (1579-1639), the first Catholic saint of African descent born in the Americas, and explores ritual portrayals of Martín among Florida's Black Diasporic communities.

His scientific awards include:

• ACLS Fellow, 2023-24

His interdisciplinary scholarship has appeared in The Black Scholar, U.S. Catholic Historian, Environment and Society, and Interfere: Journal for Critical Thought and Radical Politics. He is also a co-host of the Always Already critical theory podcast, engaging in public intellectual discourse.