Matthew Rarey is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at UW-Madison. His career at UW has been spent investigating the history and visual culture of the African diaspora in the Americas.

Matt began working with this topic when he conducted field work in the Costa Chica region of southern Mexico for his 2008 M.A. paper, Notes on a Cosmic Race: Afro-Mexicans and the Exhibitionary Complex. The paper focuses on the politics of the cultural representation of Afro-Mexican identity through museum exhibitions, popular representations, and the artworks of the Costa Chica, with a particular emphasis on the ruptures between politicized museum representation and contemporary Afro-Mexican cultural consciousness.

Matt’s current research focuses on Afro-Brazilian performance arts in tandem with culturally-specific histories and theories of sensory perception. His project examines the roles of multisensoriality and corporeal mimicry in ritualized performance arts, such as candomblé toque and capoeira, as potential sites and processes of non-discursive cultural transmission. This project is part of a larger endeavor with the end goal of developing a working theory for how cultural practice can be defined and, by extension, how culture moves across space and time.

Matt earned his M.A. in art history from UW-Madison in 2008, a B.A. in anthropology and art history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005, and a certificate in archaeological studies from Peru’s Universidad Nacional de Trujillo in 2004. A nomad most of his life, he considers Chicago, Illinois to be home.