Lester Tomé
Associate Professor of Dance
Biography
Lester Tomé, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Dance and an affiliate of the Latin American and Latino/a Studies Program at Smith College. Among the courses he teaches are 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, Cultural Theory and Research Methods.
He is a historian of Cuban ballet from the early twentieth century to the present, in the contexts of modernism/avant-gardism, the Cuban Revolution, and present-day transnationalism. His research examines ballet from the perspectives of choreographic transmission and avant-garde experimentation; cosmopolitanism, nationalism and state ideology; political mobilization and postcolonial discourse; labor, migration and political economy; racial relations and Afrodiasporic culture; gender, sexuality and masculinity; and intersections between dance, literature, cinema and ethnography.
He has been appointed Visiting Professor at the University of Bologna’s Institute of Advanced Studies (December 2025). Previously, he has been a Smith College Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (2022), the William J. Bouwsma Fellow at the National Humanities Center (2020-21), a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow (2014-15), an affiliate researcher at Harvard University’s Afro-Latin American Research Institute (2014-15), and the Peggy Rockefeller Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (2013-14).
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. He has served on the editorial boards of Dance Research Journal and Cuban Studies.
Tomé has been a guest speaker at Columbia, Harvard, Tufts, Temple, Marquette, Washington University in St. Louis, Haverford, Reed and other US academic institutions. He has also been a speaker at the 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.
Early in his career, he worked as a journalist and dance critic in Cuba and Chile. In 2004, he participated in the American Dance Festival’s Institute for Dance Criticism as a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Times Foundation.
Selected Publications
“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).