Paul Joseph López Oro

Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Bryn Mawr College

Paul Joseph López Oro is a third-generation Brooklynite by way of the Caribbean Coast of Honduras. As a transdisciplinary Black Studies scholar, their research and teaching focuses on Black Latin American & U.S. AfroLatinx social movements, Black Queer Feminist theories & ethnographies, and intersectional politics of hemispheric Blackness.

His writings are available in Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism, NACLA Report on the Americas, Postmodern Culture, Transforming Anthropology, and numerous edited volumes.

His first book Indigenous Blackness: The Queer World-Making Politics of Garifuna Nueva York (Columbia University Press) is a critical ethnographic study on how transgenerationally Garifuna New Yorkers of Caribbean Central American descent queerly and transgenerationally world-make their Black Indigeneity in New York City and its diasporas vis-a-vis ancestral memory, public performances, and digital/media spaces.

He is currently conducting archival and ethnographic research on his second book project tentatively titled Jim Crow's Xenophobia: Black Latinx Migrations in the Americas closely examines distinct localities of Black migrations at different time and space from Harlem to Puerto Rico (Schomburg), Philadelphia to Samana (African American fugitivity), Caribbean Coast of Central America (West Indians in NOLA), and Haitians on the U.S.-Mexico borders. Animated by questions at the intersections of Blackness/Citizenship/Diasporic migrations, and nation-state borders.