Dr Adom Philogene Heron
Staff details

Adom's work is concerned with questions of gender, kinship and hurricanes in the Caribbean.
Academic qualifications
- PhD, Social Anthropology (St Andrews) 2017
- MRes, Social Anthropology (St Andrews) 2012
- BA, Social Anthropology and Development Studies (Sussex) 2010
Research interests
Adom's PhD research (St Andrews, 2017) explored the complex kinship trajectories of men - as sons, lovers, fathers and grandfathers - in the Commonwealth of Dominica. He curates the 'Fathermen' blog which stands as the extroverted twin to this project .
Before joining Goldsmiths Adom held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS) at The School of Advanced Study, University of London. Here he developed a survey of Senate House Library's extensive Caribbean studies collections.
Adom’s chapter, ‘Becoming Papa’ won the Emerys Peters Essay Prize (Manchester 2014) and features in the volume Parenthood Between Generations (Berghahn 2016). His essay, ‘Naming the Father and the Mystics of Kinship’, won the 2017 Council on Anthropology and Reproduction Essay Prize (American Anth’ Assoc) and has been published in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2019). Another chapter, ‘Being Said/Seen to Care’, is forthcoming in Discourses in Latin America and The Caribbean (Palgrave 2018).
Currently, Adom is Principal Investigator on Caribbean Cyclone Cartography, a 3-year ESRC Global Challenges Research Fund project that seeks to map the social histories and futures of hurricane recovery in the Commonwealth of Dominica, an island recently devastated by Hurricane Maria (September 2017).
The Dominica Book Barrel project, which seeks to replenish some of Dominica's library stock following Maria, is an extension of this project.
Publications
Book Section
Philogene Heron, Adom. 2018. ‘Being Said/Seen to Care: Masculine Silences and Emerging Visibilities of Intimate Fatherhood in Dominica, Lesser Antilles’. In: Eleonora Esposito; Carolina Pérez-Arredondo and José Manuel Ferreiro, eds. Discourses from Latin America and the Caribbean: Current Concepts and Challenges. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 267-298. ISBN 9783319936239
Philogene Heron, Adom. 2016. Becoming Papa: Kinship, Senescence and the Ambivalent Inward Journeys of Ageing Men in the Antilles. In: Siân Pooley and Kaveri Qureshi, eds. Pooley, S., & Qureshi, K. (Eds.). (2016). Parenthood between generations: Transforming reproductive cultures. New York / Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 253-276. ISBN 9781785331503
Article
Philogene Heron, Adom. 2022. Goodnight Colston. Mourning Slavery: Death Rites and Duppy Conquering in a Circum-Atlantic City. Antipode, ISSN 0066-4812
Philogene Heron, Adom. 2021. Notes From the Ti Kai Project, Dominica: Making Home in the Hurricane's Path. The SAA Archaeological Record, 21(5), pp. 54-59. ISSN 1532-7299
Philogene Heron, Adom. 2020. Homing Empire. Public Books,
Philogene Heron, Adom. 2019. Coming to Terms with Caribbean Families. Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 43(4), pp. 41-47. ISSN 0355-3930
Philogene Heron, Adom. 2019. When 'blood speaks': naming the father and the mystics of kinship in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 25(1), pp. 29-50. ISSN 1359-0987
Philogene Heron, Adom. 2018. Review of Nicole C. Bourbonnais, Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930-1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 92(3/4), p. 375. ISSN 1382-2373
Philogene Heron, Adom. 2018. Surviving Maria from Dominica: Memory, Displacement and Bittersweet Beginnings. Transforming Anthropology, 26(2), pp. 118-135. ISSN 1051-0559
Further profile content
Research projects
2019-2022:
GCRF Caribbean Cyclone Cartography | Surviving Storms project
3-year ESRC Global Challenges Research Fund project that seeks to map the social histories and futures of hurricane r
Media engagements
2019: [Podcast] Surviving Society: E062 Adom Philogene Heron - fatherhood, Dominica & hurricanes
2020: [Video] Conversations with Anthropologists: Bristol, History & Colston
2021:
Geographies of Risk Podcast (S2E07) Dr Adom P H - Caribbean cyclone cartography | surviving storms
Disasters – and resilient responses to them – are personal, in ways that never appear in news cycles or the bottom-lines of big-budget recovery packages.
Grants and awards
2019:
Caribbean Cyclone Cartography: Mapping histories, narratives and futures of hurricane 'resilience' in a changing climate.
ESRC GCRF Equitable Resilience Grant (2019-22)