Appointment of Professor Lorgia García Peña, Latinx and Latin Americanist scholar

Lorgia García Peña. *Photo courtesy of Lorgia García Peña*

Dec. 12, 2022

The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of six faculty members, including Professor Lorgia García Peña, who specializes in the intersections of race, colonialism, and migration with a focus on Afro-Latinx lives and experiences.

Professor

Lorgia García Peña, in the Effron Center for the Study of America and the Department of African American Studies, specializes in race and colonialism and Afro-Latinx studies. Her appointment is effective July 1.

García Peña comes to Princeton from Tufts University, where she was the Mellon Professor in Studies of Race, Colonialism and Diaspora since 2021. Previously, she was a faculty member at Harvard, where she served as assistant professor from 2013-17 and as the Roy G. Clouse Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of History and Literature from 2017-21. She was an assistant professor at the University of Georgia from 2010-13.

She is the author of “Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color” (Haymarket, 2022), “Translating Blackness: Migrations of Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective” (Duke University Press, 2022) and “The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction” (Duke University Press, 2016).

García Peña is the winner of the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, the 2016 Latino/a Studies Book Award, and the 2016 Isis Duarte Book Prize in Haitian and Dominican Studies. She was named a 2021 Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation.

García Peña earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Rutgers University and a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan.

Read about all six appointments in the full Princeton University news release.