Corinna J. Moebius, Ph.D.
Writer · Cultural Anthropologist · Public Historian
I map the altared landscapes of belonging where history, memory, and magic meet.
I follow the making and unmaking of place. How does land come to hold memory, power, and the sacred? Who gets to do the storying?
Those questions need more than one orientation, so I’ve spent twenty years braiding several together.
As a cultural anthropologist, I read the rituals and repertoires people carry to, from, and between places. As a critical geographer, I track the spatial politics of who belongs where. As a public historian, I surface how stories that remember, invent, or silence the past get made through landscapes. And as a student of magic. and especially the trickster magic of power and politics, I attend to this storymaking as a kind of altaring: how memory, grief, and the sacred get bound into ground to claim power and powers, or to creatively challenge them.
I reveal this place-based storymaking through writing, mapmaking, and walking (de-tours).
Anthropology, geography, history, magic. These four roads lead to the crossroads I work at as a writer, teacher, and consultant. I share what I find as tools and walking practices that help people belong to a place without reproducing its exclusions.
Co-author of A History of Little Havana and author of the forthcoming book, Magic Cities.
As mentioned in/on:
Current Projects
Magic Cities
A transnational history of Miami’s Little Havana, Havana, and Washington, D.C.—where monuments, trees, and streets become altars of power. Part history, part cultural analysis, written for a broad public.
Core-Respondence
A practice that helps people re-orient to place/home and rethink “self” through story, movement, and ritual, without reproducing exclusionary narratives. Tools for belonging, repair, and action. Coming soon …
Little Havana
Resources, walking tours, and research on Little Havana’s (and Calle Ocho’s) layered histories: ritual, memory, and resistance in Miami’s most storied neighborhood.
Writings
In my books, essays, and other writings, I explore the “altared” landscapes of our lives — the places where history, memory, grief, and magic meet. I write from a sociocultural, decolonial, and ecological perspective, but also from lived experience: the losses and awakenings that shape how we move through a changing, shifting world.
My work lives at the crossroads of cultural anthropology, cultural geography, history, decolonial thought, and spiritual ecology. It is a companion for people who navigate complexity—who sense the world through layered histories, symbolic textures, and the wisdom that sits in places.
Learn more about my books, including my forthcoming book, Magic Cities, and subscribe to Substack (free) to access my essays.
I’m Corinna J. Moebius, Ph.D., a writer, cultural anthropologist, consultant, and guide focused on belonging, ritual, and power in places at every scale—from domestic spaces and neighborhoods to memorial landscapes, regions, and nations.
My work follows how meanings and power flow through the places we inhabit, and how small, intentional practices can repair relations and build courage. I share stories, tools, and movement-based methods that help people attend to place without reproducing exclusion.
For over twenty years, I’ve also worked as a consultant and civic leader in creative placemaking, heritage district development, and equitable community engagement. I’ve directed arts and culture festivals, co-founded a merchant alliance, chaired an economic diversification committee for a Main Street initiative, and facilitated multi-stakeholder processes for city governments and national organizations. I bring a decolonial and ethnographic lens to development work that is too often treated as purely technical.
Co-author of A History of Little Havana, my forthcoming Magic Cities braids history, ethnography, and public memory. My work cultivates inclusive, regenerative practices grounded in decolonial thinking and relational ways of being and knowing.
Speaking & Workshops
Invite me to help your audience see places—and power—anew. Or take one of my workshops, and practice belonging and repair through story, movement, and place.
Talk Topics
- Magic Cities:
Ritual, Power & the Places We Make - Core-Respondence:
Practices for Finding “Home” in a Shaky World (also offered as a workshop) - From Monuments to Altars:
Rethinking Public Memory - Heritage Districts That Work:
Equity, Identity & Creative Economy - Main Streets, Merchants & Memory:
Building Inclusive Commercial Corridors - Walking as Method:
Designing Transformative Site Encounters - Beyond “Placemaking”:
Arts for Core-Respondence in Public Spaces - Inclusive & Regenerative Tourism:
12 Principles in Practice