Corinna J. Moebius, Ph.D.
Writer · Cultural Anthropologist · Public Historian
Tracing how history, memory, and power shape the places we call home.
Co-author of A History of Little Havana and author of the forthcoming Magic Cities: Little Havana and the Rituals of Power.
Why do we believe what we do? What orients us to our world?
I study the magic and rituals of power, and the role of place and landscape in shaping what we believe and how we belong. How do individuals and groups make their right to power seem natural, even divinely given? How are entire cities or neighborhoods turned into memorials, covering history with official myth?
But domination is only one kind of power.
In places such as Little Havana, I’ve learned from people across every side of these struggles—including those who, having survived displacement and border crossing, went on to secure borders and myths of their own.
I’ve learned from people who survive through trickster resistance, through relationships of care, and through ancestral ways of knowing a living world that exceeds every label used to claim it.
This, too, is power.
For more than twenty years, I’ve worked at the crossroads of cultural anthropology, geography, and public history. Since childhood, I’ve also been a student of magic and the Living Earth. I share what I find as a guide, through walking “detours,” counter-mapping, writing, workshops, and classes.
My work reveals the spellwork of official stories, places, and identities, and opens a practice I call core-respondence.
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
I write about the “altared” landscapes of our lives—the places where history, memory, grief, and magic meet. My essays follow the same questions as my books: how power roots itself in place, and how people resist and remake it.
Subscribe on Substack (free) for new essays, and explore my books—including the forthcoming Magic Cities: Little Havana and the Rituals of Power.
Speaking & Workshops
Speaking Topics
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.
- 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
