Bri Matusovsky

Bri Matusovsky is a Ph.D. Student at the UCSF-UC Berkeley joint program in medical anthropology. Their dissertation considers what is known as "the monkey problem" of St. Kitts: the presence of invasive monkeys who make sustainable agriculture on St. Kitts near-impossible. St. Kitts and Nevis is a primarily Black Caribbean country with small minorities of wealthy white and East Indian residents who control a significant amount of its wealth and resources. Funded by the Wenner-Gren Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant, Bri conducted ethnographic and archival research on St. Kitts at various sites of human-monkey entanglement including scientific facilities, eco-tourist destinations, and farms. Their research focused on the political ecology of invasive monkeys, from which some beings such as farmers and monkeys themselves are negatively affected, and others such as tourism investors, scientists, and wealthy business owners benefit. Through investigating the notion of monkeys as a problem, Bri’s dissertation reveals larger social, historical colonial, and racial structures of inequality on St. Kitts. Bri earned their bachelor’s degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Global Health, at Yale College, where they were awarded the Solomon Research Fellowship in LGBT+ Studies for their fieldwork on queer and trans activists in Romania.