Dr. Lorgia García-Peña is a first generation Latinx Studies scholar, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic and an Afro-Latina from Trenton, NJ. She studies Blackness, colonialism, migration and diaspora with a special focus on dominicanidades. Her work is grounded on social justice, women of color feminism and Afro-Latinx episteme.  She has a strong commitment to undocumented communities, and first generation students of color. Dr. García Peña is the 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. Dr. García-Peña’s first book The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (Duke, Fall 2016) won the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, the 2016 LASA Latino/a Studies Book Award and the 2016 Isis Duarte Book Prize in Haiti and Dominican Studies.

Dr. García Peña has two forthcoming books, Translating Blackness: The Vaivén and Detours of Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke) looks at how Black Latinx migrants and their descendants grapple with various racial systems finding ways to translate racial meaning across national contexts while carving a space of belonging and representation within the nation (s) that often exclude them and Community as Rebellion (Haymarket) a meditation of teaching Ethnic Studies as a woman of color in the academy.