Nicole Castor holds a joint appointment in the Department of Anthropology and the Africana Studies Program. Her most recent project, "Invoking the Spirit: Public Culture and the Politics of Nationhood," was based on three years of research on public ritual and festival events in Trinidad (funded by grants from Fulbright-Hays and Wenner-Gren). Specifically, her ethnographic work focused on Carnival events, Orisha (Yoruba based) rituals and Black Power (or African Consciousness) movements as rich sites in which Trinidadian, African and Afro-Trinidadian identities are created and contested.

Castor's next project will be a monograph based on further field research in Trinidad on gender and sexuality in relation to the public performance of race in Carnival (tentatively titled "Spirit of Canboulay: Carnival Culture and Critical Practices"). One focus of this study will be popular culture invocations of hybridity as a social solution to the political challenges of diversity within the post-colonial nation-state.

Currently, Castor is also working on "Consuming Blackness Diasporically" (CBD), a multi-sited collective performance ethnography project that focuses on "traditions" across the Black/African diaspora including Trinidadian rapso and steelpan, Chicago house, and Brazilian capoeira. This project will enter into dialogue with artists and activists to explore where these traditions are marked as performative legacies of black struggle illustrating the ongoing historical process of decolonization through the realm of cultural practice. Charting each tradition's specific genealogy connected to specific economic, political, social contexts, CBD will use creativity, technology and expression to map out the potent relationship between decolonization, art, culture and identity.