Dr. Jamie Lee Andreson is a historian of Latin America and the African Diaspora with a research focus on gender, sexuality and religion in Brazil. She holds a PhD in anthropology and history from the University of Michigan and an MA in ethnic and African studies from the Federal University of Bahia (Universidade Federal da Bahia – UFBA). Her multidisciplinary work utilizes historical and ethnographic methods with an emphasis on public scholarship, digital humanities, and translation. She completed postdoctoral fellowships with the Africana Research Center (ARC) at the Pennsylvania State University and the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC) at the CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate Center. In Brazil, she published her first book Ruth Landes e a Cidade das Mulheres: uma releitura da antropologia do candomblé (Editora UFBA, 2019).
Dr. Andreson curated the archival photo exhibit “In the City of Women: Ruth Landes’ Photo Collection of Brazilian Candomblé, 1938–1939” at the Rosenthal Library of Queens College in Spring 2025. Her current book manuscript Divine Femininities: Matriarchy and African Heritage in Brazil looks to the head priestesses — the Mothers — of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé to examine gender in the ritual family and the uptake of matriarchy as a principle of African heritage in Brazil. The book’s novel focus on the relationship between matriarchy as a concept that comes from the socio-ritual context and the state designation of African heritage in Brazilian cultural policies shows how Black priestesses were central to crafting understandings of Africa in the nation more broadly. Her peer-reviewed research articles have appeared in the Journal of Africana Religions and Feminist Encounters.
At Simmons, she teaches Latin American and African Diaspora history courses and graduate courses with an emphasis on feminist methodologies and public history.