Lester Tomé

Lester Tomé is an associate professor in the Department of Dance and an affiliate of the Latin American and Latino/a Studies Program. The courses he teaches include Dance History: Political Bodies from Stage to Page, Dance Anthropology: Performed Identities and Embodied Cultures, Salsa in Theory and Practice, and the graduate seminars Philosophies of Contemporary Dance and Dance Studies: Theory and Methods.

A historian, he studies the development of Cuban ballet from the early twentieth century to the present—in the contexts of modernism, the Cuban Revolution and present-day transnationalism. He also researches the choreographic expressions of Futurism and other avant-garde movements in the 1910s–1930s, from a transatlantic perspective.

His articles have appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Ballet, The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet, and The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies, as well as in Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, and Cuban Studies, among other publications.

During 2026–27, he is completing research appointments as a visiting scholar at the Institute of History, in Spain, and as a Humanities Fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation, in Italy. Previously, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Bologna’s Department of the Arts and Institute of Advanced Studies, a Smith College fellow at the American Academy in Rome, a fellow of the National Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Peggy Rockefeller Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.

Tomé has been a guest speaker at Columbia, Harvard, Tufts, Temple, Marquette, Washington University in St. Louis, Haverford, Reed, and other U.S. academic institutions. He has also been a speaker at Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Madrid), Centro Gabriela Mistral (Santiago, Chile) and Universidad de Antioquia (Medellín). He has been interviewed for NPR’s Weekend Edition.

He has served on the editorial boards of Dance Research Journal and Cuban Studies.

Selected Publications

“Alejo Carpentier’s Ballet Librettos: Eclectic Avant-gardism and Vicarious Spectatorship,” in Alejo Carpentier in Context, ed. Anke Birkenmaier (Cambridge University Press, 2026). Access “Alejo Carpentier’s Ballet Librettos” postprint.

“La Giselle di Alicia Alonso: il viaggio di una ballerina cubana nel balletto romantico e nella drammaturgia moderna,” in La storia di Giselle: due secoli di metamorfosi, ed. E. Randi, Pagine di Danza vol 3 (Benevento, Italy: Kinetès Edizioni, 2025). Access “La Giselle di Alicia Alonso” postprint (in English).

“The Cuban Diaspora: Stories of Defection, Brain Drain and Brain Gain,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet, ed. K. Farrugia-Kriel and J. Nunes Jensen (Oxford University Press, 2021). Access "The Cuban Diaspora" postprint.

“Black Star, Fetishized Other: Carlos Acosta, Ballet’s New Cosmopolitanism, and Desire in the Age of Diversity,” in The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies, ed. H. Thomas and S. Prickett (Routledge, 2019). Access "Black Star, Fetishized Other" postprint. 

“The Racial Other’s Dancing Body in El milagro de anaquillé (1927): Avant-Garde Ballet and Ethnography of Afro-Cuban Performance,” in Cuban Studies 47 (2018). Access "The Racial Other’s Dancing Body in El milagro de anaquillé (1927)" postprint.

“Swans in Sugarcane Fields: Proletarian Ballet Dancers and the Cuban Revolution’s Industrious New Man,” in Dance Research Journal 49/2 (2017). Access "Swans in Sugarcane Fields" postprint.

“Envisioning a Cuban Ballet: Afrocubanismo, Nationalism and Political Commentary in Alejo Carpentier and Amadeo Roldán’s La rebambaramba (1928),” in Dance Research Journal of Korea 71/5 (2013).

“‘Music in the Blood’: Performance and Discourse of Musicality in Cuban Ballet Aesthetics,” in Dance Chronicle 36/2 (2013). Access "Music in the Blood" postprint.

“Alicia Alonso: Giselle in a Cuban Accent,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ballet, ed. M. Kant (Cambridge University Press, 2007).