Leah Kaplan

Leah A. Kaplan is a postdoctoral scholar at the Africana Research Center (ARC) at Pennsylvania State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Emory University, a master’s in African American studies from Northwestern University, and a master’s in philosophy and art from Stony Brook University. Her specializations include Black Critical Theory, Caribbean Studies, Caribbean Philosophy, and Tourism Studies. Her work has appeared in Philosophy Today, Propter Nos, and the Sikh Research Journal.

While a postdoctoral scholar at the ARC, she will work on her forthcoming manuscript entitled Tourism as Mastery which traces the continuity between racial slavery and contemporary tourism in the Anglophone Caribbean. Bringing together critical theories of anti-blackness, political ontology, and libidinal economy, the book project offers an intervention into theories of leisure, social reproduction, and black representation to make clear that tourism operates at the intersections of Caribbean geopolitics, cosmopolitan right, and white modern subject formation to make possible fantasies of freedom, pleasure, and home.