Louis Philippe Römer is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vassar College,
where he has taught Anthropology and Africana Studies since 2016. Professor Römer holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from New York University. His research focuses on the roles of language and media in electoral politics, and on the discourse and practice social movements employ to construct alternative visions of the future. Römer is currently working on a book titled Strategic Ambiguities: Race, Class, and Populism on the Caribbean Airwaves, an analysis of how populist media influencers, politicians, and movement leaders use political talk radio to redefine political identities, build heterogeneous coalitions, and shape the public imagination of what is a viable political project. Römer’s research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and by the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds of the Netherlands, among other sources.
In addition to academic scholarship, Römer is committed to public outreach through writing and participation in interdisciplinary public engagement projects, especially those that foreground Global South perspectives. His writing in this vein has appeared in Al Jazeera English, the Daily Maverick (South Africa), Kouti Pandoras (Greece), Lilith Magazine (Netherlands), and the Extra (Curaçao), and in Anthrodendum, Footnotes, and Somatosphere.
Römer is a member of the editorial team for the Corona Times blog, a public engagement project of the HUMA Institute for the Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. A carefully curated blog, Coronatimes provides a platform for scholarship on the COVID 19 pandemic that engages broader audiences outside academia and focuses mainly on scholars positioned within Africa and the Global South. Römer is a member of the South-South Forum, an interdisciplinary working group at the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College (USA) that seeks to promote conversations between scholars, activists, and artists working in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
He regularly tweets about media, language, and politics @lromeranth.