Dr. Lorgia García Peña is a writer, activist, and scholar specializing in Latinx Studies focusing on Black Latinidades. Her work is concerned with the ways in which antiblackness and xenophobia intersect the Global North, producing categories of exclusion that lead to violence and erasure. Through her writing and teaching, Dr. García Peña insists on highlighting the knowledge, cultural, social, and political contributions of people who have been silenced from traditional archives.
She is the author of three award-winning books, The Borders of Dominican Dad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (Duke, 2016), which was translated and published in Spanish by Editorial Bonó in 2020; Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke, 2022) and Community as Rebellion (Haymarket, 2022), translated as La comunidad como rebelión (Haymarket, 2023). Additionally, her work has been covered in several publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Boston Review, and Harper’s Bazaar. She has appeared on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, Univision, and Telemundo, and is a regular contributor to NACLA and Asterix Journals.
An engaged scholar committed to liberating education and bridging the gaps that separate the communities she comes from (Black, immigrant, working) and the university, Dr. García Peña is also a co-founder of Freedom University Georgia, a school that provides college instruction to undocumented students and the co-director of Archives of Justice, a transnational digital archive project that centers the life of people who identify as Black, queer, and migrant. She has been widely recognized for her public-facing work: in 2022, she received the Angela Davis Prize for Public Scholarship. In 2021, the Margaret Casey Foundation named her a Freedom Scholar, and in 2017, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) presented her a Disobedience Award for the co-founding of Freedom University. Additionally, her scholarship has been supported by the Ford Foundation, The Johns Hopkins University African Diaspora Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Future of Minority Studies Fellowship and the Mellon Foundation.
Lorgia García Peña received a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2009 and an M.A. in Latin American and Latino Literatures from Rutgers University.