Rachel Cantave

Rachel Cantave is a Haitian-American Jaspora from New York. She enjoys reading memoirs, listening to The Read, and Latin American and Caribbean carnivals. She is also co-founder of The Ebony Tower.com

She holds a BA in Individualized Study from NYU with a focus on colonial and postcolonial histories of Latin America and the Caribbean. She studied abroad in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil in 2006 and returned in 2008 to facilitate an exchange program for Afro-Brazilian entrepreneurial youth through the organization Levantamos.

She holds an M.A. in Public Anthropology and a Ph.D in Anthropology from American University.

In 2014, she received a Fulbright Research Fellowship to conduct fieldwork on religion, morality and social justice in Northeastern Brazil. Her dissertation, “Serving Faith: A Comparative Study of Religious Influence and Faith-Based  Community Service in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil” was completed with support from The Reed Foundation’s Ruth Landes Memorial Grant. She is published in the Journal of Religious Studies, History and Society.