Lorgia Garcia Peña, PhD

Tufts University

QUOTE

"For the majority of our human history, we have had a very small group of people who have been in power. And the majority of the people have been denied basic access, basic rights. And the way in which that has shaped our humanity is devastating. How many times are we going to have to do this? How many times are we going to have to ask that our lives matter?"

BIO

Lorgia García Peña is the Mellon Associate Professor at Tufts University’s Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora where she focuses on Latinx studies, global Blackness, and Dominican diaspora studies.

She is the author of The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations, and Archives of Contradictions, which reveals, through the Dominican experience, how marginality is created through acts of exclusion. The Borders of Dominicanidad has won multiple awards, including the 2016 LASA Latino/a Studies Book Award and the 2016 Isis Duarte Book Prize in Haiti and Dominican Studies. Peña is currently working on an on-going book-length project titled Translating Blackness: Migrations and Detours of Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspectives.