# Alexander van Biema

**Source**: https://africana.cornell.edu/alexander-van-biema
**Parent**: https://africana.cornell.edu/graduate-students

## Ph.D. Student in Africana Studies

### Overview

Alex van Biema is a first year Africana Ph.D. student from Brooklyn, New York and has a B.A. in Africana Studies from Vassar College. His research interests focus on the survivance of the entangled African and Jewish diasporas in the Caribbean through an analysis of Caribbean literature and philosophy. More broadly, Alex is deeply invested in plumbing the depth and breadth of the trans-oceanic nature of histories of Afro-Jewish encounters (spanning from the 15th century to the present) which encompasses the Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, and Mediterranean Ocean Worlds, while paying particular attention to how these histories articulate with the global Black Radical Tradition.