2023 – present
Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences – University of Lisbon
Project title: “Naming Transformations in Portuguese and Umbundu: The Politics of Subject Constitution in Central Angola from 1846 to the Present”

Spanning the long duration of the colonization and decolonization of Central Angola, this project considers continuities and ruptures in the politics of subject constitution by taking into account how different forms of designating oneself and others in Portuguese and Umbundu, the vernacular spoken in this region, index different possibilities of action and experience in changing sociopolitical contexts: the period of the caravan trade in politically independent Umbundu-speaking polities (1846-1902), the establishment of Portuguese colonial rule following the military subjugation of Central Angola in the aftermath of the Bailundo War (1903-1961), the liberation struggle (1961-1975), the civil war (1975-2002), and finally the post-war period (2003-now).

2023
Fellow at co2libri – Freie Universität Berlin
Project title: “Before Fugitivity: The Umbundu Concept of Ocilombo and Community Building Practices in 19th-Century Central Angola”

Listen to the interview with Iracema Dulley, conducted by Lena Wassermeier, about the project

In this project, I draw on the reflections on fugitivity developed around the concept of quilombo, in Portuguese, a transliterative iteration of the Umbundu term ocilombo, and investigate the relationship between the kinds of communal practices associated with these concepts in Brazil and Angola.

2022 – 2023
Research Fellow at ICI Berlin – Institute for Cultural Inquiry
Project title: “Subject Constitution, Ethnography, and the Case Study”

Dulley’s project addresses  processes of subject constitution from the perspectives of  anthropology and psychoanalysis through two methodological reductions: the case study and ethnographic theory. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research on colonial and post-colonial Angola, on the one hand, and on the clinical practice of psychoanalysis by herself and others, on the other hand, Dulley explores and compares processes of subject constitution in three different settings: fieldwork, the analytical setting, and the archive. 

2022 – 2025
Team member at Berlin University Alliance
Project title: “Conceptual Collaboration: Living Borderless Research Interaction – co2libri” 

(in collaboration with various researchers at Freie University and Humboldt University)
As an interdisciplinary and transregionally oriented initiative, co2libri seeks to apply a multicentric perspective which engages with neglected positions of Southern theory and visions for a decolonial research praxis as a central part of our academic self-understanding. 

2020 – 2023
Team member at Columbia University
Project title: “Extremities at War: Brazil, Angola, and the U.S.”

(Principal Investigator: Maria José de Abreu)
This project proposes to stage a comparison between three violence-inflicted geographical contexts: Brazil, Angola, and the U.S. Its prime goal is to think about the question of sovereignty as it manifests itself in the temporalities and embodiments of war and peace. The temporality, effects, and embodiment of violence in the extremities are to be communicated through a performance lecture comprised by text and choreography. 

2020-2022
Fellow at ICI Berlin – Institute for Cultural Inquiry
Project title: “Designation: Naming Subjects in Angola”

This project considers the relation between naming and subject constitution through an interrogation of both reduction  and complexification. How do the names attributed to oneself and others intertwine with changing contextual  positionalities related to race, ethnicity, status, gender, region, and class? To answer this question, an ethnographic  theorization of how the performativity of naming constitutes subjects via fixation and displacement is proposed. In analyzing the iterative chain of signification through which subjects were constituted by state and vernacular naming in colonial and post-colonial Angola, aspects of interpellation related to reduction (fixation, designation, totalization, homogenization) and complexification (dissemination, transformation, displacement) are considered simultaneously.

2017 – 2020
Grantee and Principal Investigator at FAPESP
Project title: “Processes of Subject Constitution in African Contexts: Differentiation, Iteration, Intersectionality”

The project comprised a team of 21 people, including seven students and twelve researchers based at institutions in Brazil, South Africa, Angola, China, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. It considered processes of subject constitution in Sub-Saharan Africa, i.e., processes in which subjects are socially placed and/or displaced and thus come to occupy social positionalities that foster or foreclose determined and contextual possibilities of action and experience. Analysis focused on processes of differentiation in which subjects are constituted through the intersectionality between social places, such as: legal practices; political, religious, and aesthetic performances; kinship; literary practices; interpellation, accusation, and naming. The project developed iterative analysis as a method to make sense of  processes of differentiation and subject constitution in time.

Federal University of Sao Carlos, Department of Social Sciences
2019 – UG course Post-Structuralism and Queer Theory
2019 – PG seminar Laboratory of Contemporary Anthropology I
2019 – PG seminar Laboratory of Contemporary Anthropology II
2018 – PG course Anthropology and Philosophy
2018 – UG course Post-Colonial Studies: Reflections on Angola

State University of Campinas, Department of Anthropology
2014 – UG course Witchcraft and Sorcery
2014 – UG course Myth and Ritual