Authors Dispossessions in the Americas

Carolina Angel Botero is a Colombian Lawyer and Anthropologist with a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) and an MA in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies for 2023-2025 at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are in the intersections between law, anthropology, and natural sciences.

Obed Arango Hisijara is a citizen of Latin America of Mexican origin, photographer, social anthropologist, social leader and university professor. Additionally, he is the founder and executive director of the Center for Culture, Art, Work and Education (CCATE), a non-profit organization that was founded in 2011, and is located in the metropolitan area of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and whose mission is: “to promote change and social transformation based on the talents of the Latin community, at the intersection with education, art, culture, technology, health and environmental sciences.”

As an academic, Obed was a full professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico between 1991 and 2003 and where he continues to teach courses by invitation in the graduate unit and is currently a graduate adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States where teaches the subjects of Social Policy and the Latino Community, and Participatory Action Research. In his academic journey, Obed has presented in numerous national and international forums topics related to immigration, ethnography of social space, semiotics of culture, education, and human development. He has also published in books and academic journals in the United States, Latin America and the United Kingdom on the same topics.

Solon Natalício Araújo dos Santos is a PhD candidate and Master in Social History from the Federal University of Bahia, Specialist in Teaching for Professional and Technological Education (Ead modality) from the Federal Institute of Espirito Santo (IFES Campus Colatina), Specialist in University Teaching from the University of State of Bahia (Department of Human Sciences and Technology-Campus XVI) in Irecê-BA, in Inclusion and Diversity in Education (Ead modality) from the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia, Degree in History from the State University of Bahia (Department of Sciences Humanas-Campus IV) in Jacobina-BA. Teacher of Basic and Professional Education at the Department of Education of the State of Bahia (SEC-BA) and the Municipal Department of Education of Mulungu do Morro - BA. Researcher with experience in Indigenous History, Worlds of Work and Rural Unionism. Author of the book Os Payayá no Sertão das Jacobinas (1651-1706) by Editora Appris.

Juan Pablo Ardila is a historian of Latin America. His research studies the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from a cultural and social history perspective. He is currently working on a book project and finishing two articles. His book project studies the ways in which emotions, such as fear, confusion, guilt, and hope, gave meaning to people’s sense of reality, their memories, and their imagined futures in the territories of the former Viceroyalty of New Granada. The project focuses on the period between 1808, when the Spanish monarchical crisis broke out, and 1830, when the first Republic of Colombia dissolved. His research explores the role of emotions shaping political debates and both facilitating and hindering reforms. By doing so, he looks at the inner workings of emotions. He delves into questions concerning how emotions came about, how emotional experiences varied across society, and how individuals and social groups used emotional expressions strategically. One of the articles studies the life of a vagrant who travelled across Spain during the mid-18th century. The second one explores the circulation of rumors and pamphlets during the Comunero Revolt in New Granada in 1781.

Javier R. Ardila is a historian from the National University of Colombia. He is in the second year of his PhD in history at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a researcher for the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History—ICANH (2019-2022), the Central and Historical Archives of the National University of Colombia (2017-2021), and the National Museum of Colombia (2017-2019). His work focuses on books, libraries, readers, and knowledge circulation during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Latin America, particularly in the former Viceroyalty of the New Kingdom of Granada. He is the author of De Voltaire a Balmes. La reconstrucción the la biblioteca de José Manuel Groot (1800-1878) (2023), coeditor with Francisco Ortega of El ajedrez del Bicentenario. Pedagogía del teatro para la enseñanza de la historia (2023), and author of several articles published in Libraries: Culture, History, and Society, Historia Crítica, Historia y Espacio, Procesos y Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura.

Paulo Ilich Bacca is the deputy director of Dejusticia and a professor at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. He has conducted fieldwork in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Australia, and the United States and has collaborated with indigenous organizations from both the Global South and North. He is the author of the book “Indigenous Rights in the Age of Recognition” (Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2019) and co-editor of the book “Indigenous Ontologies in International Law” (Dejusticia – Universidad de los Andes, 2023). His writings for general audiences include school textbooks, intercultural booklets, and journalistic chronicles. Currently, he is working on his book “Indigenizing International Law: A Climate Ethnography of Multispecies Justice,” a project he has been developing since 2014, which aims to reinterpret and transform international law through indigenous cosmologies. His inspiration is born from walking the mountains, lagoons, and volcanoes of his native Nariño, in the southwestern part of Colombia, and from riding his bicycle, an activity that has allowed him to better understand the ethical mandates that arise from the territories he traverses.

Catherine Bartch is the Associate Director of the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Co-Director of the Penn Model Organization of American States (OAS) program. Her research interests include Latin American politics, U.S. politics, democratic theory, civic education and participation, university-community partnerships, and international development. She has taught an array of courses on these topics and others, including International Organizations in Latin America, Latin American Politics, and Latinxs and the Law, at various regional private and public universities and community colleges. Her current research and teaching focus on how to educate for global political participation. She is involved in local and state-level politics, and she has served as an election monitor in the U.S., Bolivia, and Guatemala. Catherine also serves on the board of CCATE and the Institute for Dialogue and Diplomacy. Cathy has a Ph.D.in Political Science, Temple University, and an M.A. in Latin American Studies, University of Miami (Coral Gables, FL).

Ethnographer, historian, and museum consultant. During her tenure at Penn, she was Associate Faculty in the Penn Cultural Heritage Center, Coordinator of Native American and Indigenous Studies, and Consultant to the American Section of the Penn Museum. She has received research awards from the American Philosophical Society, Five College Fellowship, Ford Foundation, and School for Advanced Research, among others. She directs a restorative research project, called “The Wampum Trail,” that focuses on the materiality, meaning, and recovery of historical wampum objects. She is Co-P.I. for the Dispossessions in the Americas Research Team.

Randall Burson is an MD-PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology and Perelman School of Medicine, and a Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Indigenous and Intercultural Studies at the Universidad de la Frontera (Chile). Broadly, his research uses ethnographic and participatory approaches to study how large-scale socio-political contexts shapes peoples’ everyday experiences of giving and receiving health care. Currently, he is working with Mapuche Indigenous and biomedical health practitioners in Southern Chile’s “intercultural” clinics to understand how overlapping dispossessive processes manifest in Mapuche peoples’ health and illness. Through his dissertation research, he is also examining how these intercultural clinics becomes key sites for negotiating material resources and political self-determination in occupied Wallmapu (Southern Chile and Argentina).

Eduardo Carrera is a third-year PhD student focusing on Latin American contemporary and modern art. His research interests lie in postcolonial and queer approaches to art history, curatorial practices and writing. Most recently, he served as the Director and curator at Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito (CAC Quito, Ecuador 2017-2022).

Ricardo Castillo-Neyra, PhD, DVM, MSPH, is the Co-Director of the Zoonotic Diseases Research Laboratory (ZDRL), a collaborative research consortium between multiple US-based and international institutions that employs over 30 full-time staff. He systematically applies the One Health approach to studying tropical infectious diseases in Latin America. Dr. Castillo has focused his research on the epidemiology of zoonotic diseases in urban areas, the fastest-growing ecosystems in the world. Dr. Castillo is the PI of three NIH-funded projects focused on the socio-spatial dynamics of urban zoonotic diseases and the optimization of mass vaccination campaigns to control epidemics. He is also the Co-PI of a Mellon Foundation project where he studies the intersection of social inequalities, access to health services, and the emergence of infectious diseases.

Coletivo Cacos is a collaborative, independent, feminist and anti-racist organization operating in Brazil to promote social justice, based on strategic actions in the areas of communication, citizenship, culture, arts and education.

PhD student in History (UNICAMP). Fellow of FAPESP (Process 2021/12077-4). Specialist in Indigenous Ethnology. Linked to LABORINDIO - Research Group on Labor in the Americas (CNPq/USP). Develops research in Indigenous History, History of America and Colonial Brazil.

Santiago is an experienced policy analyst from Argentina, specializing in sustainable development and governance, with a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, he works as a Research and Policy Specialist in Environment and Governance at the Global Policy Centre for Governance of United Nations Development Program. Before joining UNDP, Santiago worked as a Research Economist in the Infrastructure and Energy Sector at the Inter-American Development Bank. Throughout his career, Santiago has successfully led and managed research programs in the academic, public, and private sectors. With expertise in policy impact evaluation using qualitative and quantitative methods, Santiago has a comprehensive understanding of key policy issues and challenges facing various sectors, including energy, environment, and health policies. His research has been published in academic journals and books in the US, Europe, and Latin America. Before pursuing his doctorate at Penn, he received an MA in Political Science from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and a Licenciatura in Political Science from the Universidad de Buenos Aires.

Brian I. Daniels, Ph.D. is Director of Research and Programs for the Penn Cultural Heritage Center at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. He serves as First Vice President (President-Elect) of the Archaeological Institute of America, Secretary of the International Council of Museums Disaster Resilience Committee, a scholar trustee of the New-York Historical Society, and a Board Member of the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield. Between 2013 and 2018, he co-directed the Safeguarding the Heritage of Syria and Iraq Project, which supported heritage professionals working to protect museums and archaeological sites in conflict zones. He has also advised the National Museum of Afghanistan, Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, and several international organizations pursuing legal cases involving the destruction of cultural heritage. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, Rutgers University, San Francisco State University, American University of Rome, and for ICCROM’s First Aid for Culture course. Dr. Daniels has received the Society for American Archaeology’s Presidential Recognition Award for his efforts to protect Syrian and Iraqi cultural heritage and the Society for the Preservation of American Indian Culture’s Lynn Reyer Award for his work with Indigenous communities in California.

Tulia G. Falleti is Principal Investigator of the research project “Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present,” funded by the Mellon Foundation. Falleti is a sociologist (BA, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1994) and political scientist (Ph.D., Northwestern University, 2003), who has been teaching and conducting research at the University of Pennsylvania since 2004. She was the inaugural Director of the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies (2021-2024), Director of its preceding Program (2016-2021), and Chair-Elect and Chair of the University’s Faculty Senate (2022-2024). She is the author of the award-winning book Decentralization and Subnational Politics in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and, with Santiago L. Cunial, of Participation in Social Policy: Public Health in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Falleti has also co-edited Latin America Since the Left Turn (with Emilio Parrado, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), The Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism (with Orfeo Fioretos and Adam Sheingate, 2016), and El Federalismo Argentino en Perspectiva Comparada (with Lucas González and Martín Lardone, EDUCC, 2012/2013). Some of her academic articles on decentralization, democracy, participation, qualitative methods, and Indigenous politics can be found in her Penn website.

Dr. Farnsworth-Alvear teaches in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania and is affiliated with Penn’s Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies, as well as with both the Program for Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and the Center for Africana Studies. Her first book, Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men, and Women in Colombia’s Industrial Experiment, 1905-1960 (Duke University Press, 2000) won the Bolton-Johnson prize, awarded by the American Historical Association, and the Allan Sharlin prize, awarded by the Social Science History Association. She is co-editor of The Colombia Reader (Duke University Press, 2016), and is currently working on a book about industrial dredging for gold and platinum in the San Juan region of the Colombian Chocó, during the 20th century. In the context of this project, she is part of an international team that includes the Fundación Muntú Bantú, in Quibdó, Colombia. Relevant work can be accessed via the website of the Endangered Archives Project of the British Library. Additional research interests include the contemporary history of Angola. She lives in Philadelphia with her family.

(Ph.D. Social Anthropology, National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 2020) works at the Brazilian Ministry of Indigenous Peoples as a General Coordinator in the Department of Mediation of Indigenous Land Conflicts. From 2021-22, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Project “Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present”, at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, from 2017-18, she was a Visiting Scholar at the LLILAS Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. Over the past 15 years, she has developed in-depth studies among Indigenous peoples and other traditional communities in Brazil, focusing on territorial rights and the mobilizations of these groups to defend their territories, lifeways and collective projects. Her master’s thesis, published in book form in 2019, earned the Norm and Sibby Whitten Publication Subvention Award for Anthropological Monographs on Lowland South America by the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America. Her Ph.D. dissertation, awarded Honorable Mention for the Brazilian Ministry of Education’s National Dissertation Award, was published in 2022.

Vitor Flynn Paciornik is a comic artist and illustrator from São Paulo, Brazil, with degrees in Fine Arts and Social Sciences from the University of São Paulo. In 2016, he published his first album, Xondaro (Editora Elefante and the Rosa Luxemburgo Foundation), focusing on the struggle of the Guarani Mbya from São Paulo to retake their territory. In 2020, he published The Owners of the Land, in partnership with Daniela Fernandes Alarcon and Glicéria Jesus da Silva, a graphic novel about the trajectory and the mobilization of the Tupinambá in southern Bahia. Funded by the Secretariat of Culture of the City of São Paulo, the book was included in the Brazil Comics Catalogue (edited by the Curitiba Biennial of Comics and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and was a finalist for the 2021 HQMix Trophy, the main comics award in Brazil. In the same year, he coauthored Watercolor (which was among the ten finalists of the 2021 Jabuti Prize and the HQMix) with André Bernardino, with whom he also released, at the end of 2021, After the Bell Tolls (HQMix finalist in the adventure/horror/fantasy category). Both projects were carried out with support from the São Paulo Cultural Action Program (ProAC), an incentive program from the state government. Since 2013, he has maintained the authorial blog Quadrinhos B, dedicated to short stories.

Dr. Lee Francis 4 (Pueblo of Laguna) aka Dr. IndigiNerd is the Founder and Chief Imagination Officer of the Indigenous Imagination Workshop an organization dedicated to sparking and cultivating the Indigenous Imagination. He is an educator and entrepreneur and is the founder of the Indigenous Comic Con, Indigenous Worlds of Wonder, the Indigenous Futurisms Festival, Native Realities and Red Planet Books and Comics. He is also an award-winning writer and editor and has multiple publications from poetry to short stories to comics. He was the host and lead writer for IndigiGenius on New Mexico PBS and the co-producer for Sovereign Innovations on PBS Digital. He is also the creator of Sovereignty Gardens, a Native American kids puppetry show that teaches youth about gardening and food sovereignty. He continues to be a strong advocate for Native American youth especially in helping them in the areas of creative entrepreneurship. He lives in North Carolina with his family.

Glicéria Jesus da Silva (Glicéria Tupinambá) is a well-known Indigenous leader, artist and researcher from the village of Serra do Padeiro, located in the Tupinambá de Olivença Indigenous Territory, in Bahia, Brazil. Because of her relentless commitment to the recognition of the Tupinambá’s land rights, she has been repeatedly threatened and criminalized. Currently, she pursues a master’s degree in Social Anthropology at the National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Her research focuses on the contemporary efforts of the Tupinambá to recover their material culture, intertwined with their struggle for land. More specifically, she investigates the remaining mantles of scarlet ibis feathers produced during the 16th and 17th centuries, while also creating contemporary mantles. In 2020, Glicéria co-authored with Daniela Alarcon and Vitor Flynn the graphic novel The Owners of the Land. In 2023, with Alexandre Mortágua, she co-directed the feature film When the Cloak Speaks and What the Cloak Says, which premiered at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP). In 2024, she became the first Indigenous artist to hold a solo exhibit in the Brazilian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, with “Ka’a Pûera: We Are Walking Birds,”

Dr. Hanchard directs the Marginalized Populations project of the Department of Africana Studies at Penn. His research and teaching interests combine a specialization in comparative politics with an interest in contemporary political theory, encompassing themes of nationalism, racism, xenophobia and citizenship. His publications include Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988 (Princeton, 1994), Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil, editor, (Duke, 1999), Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought (Oxford, 2006) and most recently The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (Princeton, 2018). The Spectre of Race received the Ralphe J. Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association in 2019 for the best book on ethnic and cultural pluralism, and was named one of the Ten Best Books in 2018 by the Times Educational Supplement in London. Prof. Hanchard was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.

Jonathan D. Katz is an art historian, curator and queer activist. Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, Katz is a pioneering figure in the development of queer art history, and author of a number of books and articles, often writing the first queer accounts of numerous artists. He has curated many exhibitions, nationally and internationally, including the first major museum queer exhibition in the US, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Smithsonian, which won several national and international best exhibition and book awards. The first full-time American academic to be tenured in what was then called Lesbian/Gay Studies, Katz was also the Founding Director of Yale University’s queer studies program, the first in the Ivy League. An activist academic, he also founded the Queer Caucus for Art, co-founded Queer Nation, San Francisco, and co-founded the Gay and Lesbian Town Meeting, the organization that successfully lobbied for queer anti-discrimination statutes in the city of Chicago. Katz is President Emeritus of The Leslie Lohman Museum for queer art in New York. His next major exhibition is called The First Homosexuals, an international; survey of the earliest art produced internationally after the word “homosexual” was coined.

Ryan is a cartographer and GIS analyst. In addition to the Penn-Mellon Just Futures Dispossessions in the Americas project, he has worked on numerous mapping projects with the United States Census Bureau, the United States Geological Survey, the Defense Health Agency and the World Bank. With the Census Bureau, he was part of a team that won a Bronze Medal Award for an interactive mapping project showing migration patterns within the US. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a master’s degree in Geographic Information Science from Penn State University.

Doctor in History of the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean and Graduate in Biology. She is a Retired Professor of the Department of History, University of California Santa Barbara. She is the author of several essays, including “Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, the Quintessential Maroon: Towards an African -Diasporic Epistemology,” Esclavizadas litigantes, ideas y praxis de una modernidad silenciada,” “Esclavizadas, cimarronaje y la ley en Venezuela, 1760-1809.” Dr. Laurent-Perrault just submitted to the University of Pennsylvania Press, the book titled “Claiming Dignity, Black Women’s Political Interventions in Colonial Venezuela.” Dr. Laurent-Perrault is a Consultant-Education Coordinator for the project “Dispossession in the Americas: extraction of bodies, lands, and cultural heritages from the conquest to the present,” A project coordinated by the Center for Latino and Latin American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the “National Museum of the American Latino Museum" (NMAL) - the Smithsonian Institution.

Marian Leech is a PhD candidate in the department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include political economy, material culture, and intellectual and ecological histories of the early modern period in Europe and North America. Her current dissertation project examines seventeenth-century exchanges in Northeastern North America (Lenape and Munsee homelands) related to the colonial fur trade. She studies how Indigenous value systems, diplomatic traditions, and ecological knowledge shaped the terms of exchange and how Indigenous leaders challenged imperial claims of possession. Following animal skins (particularly beaver pelts) back to Europe, she examines merchant and consumer networks and artisan practices in the Dutch Republic and Archangel, Russia.

Dr. Leventhal is Executive Director of the Penn Cultural Heritage Center [http://www.pennchc.org/] of the Penn Museum as well as Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves as Curator in the American Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology where he formerly served as the Williams Director. Prior to coming to Penn, he was the President of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. Leventhal received his PhD from Harvard University. He is one of the Directors of the Tihosuco Heritage Preservation and Community Development Project focused upon the 19th century Caste War rebellion in the Yucatan. He has written extensively about the ancient Maya and about cultural heritage preservation.

Dr. Levy has focused most of his career on insect vectors of infectious diseases, specifically Chagas disease. As an interdisciplinary researcher, his work on bed bugs has drawn him into housing policy, economics, and social justice—work which naturally extended into modeling of the effect of evictions during the Covid-19 pandemic. The heart of his research program is the University of Pennsylvania / Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia Zoonotic disease research laboratory in Arequipa, Peru which he co-founded and directs. In addition, Dr. Levy is Co-P.I. for the Dispossessions in the Americas Research Team.

Fernanda Ligabue is a cinematographer and documentarist with a degree in Image and Sound from the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil. She worked as a researcher at the production company O2 Filmes and as a videographer at Filmes para Bailar and Teatro Oficina. Currently, she works as a freelance documentarist and photographer for independent media projects and non-governmental organizations focused on human rights and socio-environmental issues, including A Pública, Repórter Brasil, Greenpeace Brazil and International, Instituto Socioambiental, WWF, Rainforest Foundation Norway, Global Witness and World Animal Protection. She is one of the founding members of the Collective of Women and Transgenders at the Brazilian Cinematography Department (DAFB).

Márcia Regina de Lima Silva is the Secretary for Affirmative Action Policies, Combating and Overcoming Racism at the Ministry of Racial Equality. She is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of São Paulo. She is a senior researcher associated with the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP), where she coordinated the AFRO-Núcleo de Pesquisa e Formação em Raça, Gênero e Justiça Racial. She has a PhD in Sociology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (2001). She did a post-doctorate at the University of Columbia (2011-2012) and was a Visiting Fellow at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute (ALARI) of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University (2016-2017). Her research focuses on racial inequalities and race relations, with an emphasis on gender and race, education, the labor market and affirmative action policies.

Carmen Medeiros holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from the City University of New York (2005) and specializes in Latin America with particular emphasis on the Central Andean region, the anthropological critique of development and modernity / coloniality; struggles for citizenship and modern discourses on race and mestizaje; feminist theory and postcolonial debates. Dr. Medeiros has taught at the graduate and undergraduate level in the US, in addition to countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. She has also been a consultant with Bolivian research centers and international development agencies. Current she is a senior researcher at Plurinational Observatory of Educational Quality (Observatorio Plurinacional de Calidad Educativa -OPCE) focusing on the intersection of coloniality, development and education policies in the context of the ‘proceso de cambio’ in Bolivia.

KC is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on human-animal relationships and agrarian societies throughout the early modern Atlantic World with a specific focus on the Andes. His dissertation focuses on human-herd entanglements in colonial Cusco and Lima.

Laura Pensa holds a degree in Anthropology (UBA) and a PhD in Romance Languages and Literature (UMICH), focusing on Colonial Latin America and Indigenous Studies. She is interested in insurgent indigenous groups of the South American lowlands, historical writing, visual studies, and contemporary Latin American literature. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania (2023-2024) and is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University (2024-2026).

Roberto Mamani Mamani is an internationally acclaimed Aymara artist and muralist from La Paz and Cochabamba, Bolivia. His extraordinary and vivid artwork depicts symbols and messages of the Andean Indigenous tradition and cosmovision or worldview, conveying the community’s strength and pride and commitment to sustainable, peaceful, and spiritual living. He weaves in historical themes such as the impact of colonization and how the Aymara-Quechua community, after years of marginalization and oppression, has fought for an empowered collective identity in the region. A self-taught artist, Roberto Mamani Mamani has displayed his artwork in approximately 60 exhibitions worldwide including in Argentina, Brazil, United States, Mexico, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom. He has participated in World Expos and the La Biennale Di Venezia/ International Art Exhibition in Italy, and he has received numerous national and international accolades over the years. In addition, Roberto Mamani Mamani painted the giant, 12-story murals on the Wiphala community housing project in El Alto, Bolivia, a city adjacent to La Paz.

Giovani Rocha is a graduate student in the Joint PhD in Political Science and Africana Studies at UPenn. He has a BA in economics from the Brazilian Institute of Capital Markets, and holds a Masters in Administration with a focus on Government, Institutions, and Public Policies from Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV). His research focuses on the relationship between black movements and the adoption of racial equality policies in the North and Northeast regions of Brazil. Prior to starting his PhD at Penn, he worked with education policy implementation at the Secretariat of Education of Pará, the Brazilian Ministry of Education, served as a consultant to the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, and co-founded Mahin, a black organization devoted to strengthening the racial equality policy agenda with third sector organizations and local governments in Brazil. He is fellow at Lemann Foundation, an alumni at the US Department of State, and has been a TEDx speaker twice.

Vivian is a feminist political geographer interested in the spatialities of social reproduction, the embodiment of labor processes, and the geopolitics of gender violence. Her doctoral dissertation, “Countertopographies of Care: the Rise of Care-activism in the Movement for Women’s Lives in Mexico,” explores how urban activism by women organized against feminicidal violence mobilizes care as an instrument for protest in opposition to an uncaring state and the devaluation of women’s lives. the Before joining the Mellon Just Futures Initiave “Dispossessions in the Americas” project as Grant Manager, Vivian was Programs Coordinator at Sociedad Mexicana de Valores de Arte Mexicano and served as M&E Officer at Fondo Semillas. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from Penn State University, a Master’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from The University of Texas at Austin, and a B.A. in Latin American Studies from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She is originally from Mexico City.

Gwendalynn Roebke (they/them/theirs) is an interdisciplinary PhD student currently in their 2nd year in Penn’s Philosophy department. Their interests, in brief, are social psychology/affect, neuroscience, agency, identity formation (and its attempted inhibition), and coloniality; all with a healthy engagement in narrativity and poetics.

Georgie Sánchez is a 2023–2024 Lassen Fellow and Ph.D. student in modern and contemporary at Princeton University. Before Princeton, Georgie served as the curator of CENTRO, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. Georgie is the arts coordinator of “Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from la Conquista to the Present,” a multidisciplinary initiative between the University of Pennsylvania and the Mellon Foundation. He received a scholarship from the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) to participate in the Independent Study Program (PEI) in their 2019-2020 edition. His writings have been published by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorrriqueña, the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, Anomaly Journal, the Queens Museum, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, among others. His poetry, photographs, and curatorial projects address Latinx & Diaspora studies, HIV/AIDS, Queer/Cuir perspectives, and sexual dissidence.

With a postgraduate degree in Gender, Race and Sexualities, Donminique Santos is a Brazilian journalist, writer and documentary filmmaker by training, working on national projects linked to diversity, political innovation and journalism.

Master’s in Social History and Bachelor’s in History from the State University of Campinas - Unicamp. Student of the Student Training Program - Center for Critical Imagination: political economy and citizenship (CCI)/Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento (Cebrap). She is also a member of the Center for Research and Training in Race, Gender and Social Justice (Afro) at Cebrap. Her research focuses on the History of Racism, the History of Black Women, the History of Brazil, the History of Labor and the Thought of Black Intellectuals. She produced a dissertation on black women workers, racism and sexism in the Campinas labor market in the final years of slavery and in the immediate post-abolition period. She received an honorable mention in the Fausto Castilho Monograph Contest promoted by the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences at Unicamp and was awarded a prize in the humanities, social and economic sciences dissertation category of the IV Human Rights Academic Recognition Award promoted by Unicamp and the Vladimir Herzog Institute. She is a researcher on the project “Black women and the labor market: a study of domestic workers in Brazil” carried out by Afro Cebrap and the University of Pennsylvania.

Whodson is anthropologist and member of the New Amazon Social Cartography Project’s (Projeto Nova Cartografia Social da Amazônia) network of researchers. Lately, he has been investigating the effects of large mining and energy infrastructure projects on Northeastern Brazil.

Dr. Lucía Isabel Stavig is a Penn-Mellon Just Futures Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. received her PhD in Cultural and Medical Anthropology from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2022),a Master’s in Anthropology from the University of Lethbridge, Canada (2017), a Master’s in Justice and Social Inquiry from Arizona State University (2013), and a Bachelor of Arts from New College of Florida (2010). She is Peruvian-American and has had the honor to learn with Las Abejas and the zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico; the Rama people in Nicaragua; the Ñhäñhú (Otomí) in Hidalgo, Mexico; the Kainai (Blackfoot) in southern Alberta, and the Runa (Quechua) of the Cusco area. Lucía´s research explores how Indigenous peoples’ struggles for health are also political defenses of their lands and more-than-human relations. Her work in reproductive and Indigenous justice follows the efforts of First peoples from Canada to southern Peru to heal from colonial reproductive violences (including forced sterilization, forced contraception, obstetric violence, and genocide) to create Indigenous futures for generations to come.

Hilaria Supa Huamán, a Peruvian politician and human rights activist, served as a Congresswoman for Cusco from 2006 to 2016. Born in 1957, she witnessed the mistreatment of indigenous peoples under the hacienda system. Her grandfather, an advocate for farmer’s rights, was murdered in 1965. Supa became involved in community programs in the 1980s, providing free meals for impoverished children and advocating for land rights. She held leadership positions in various organizations, including the Women’s Federation of Anta, where she focused on education and health issues. Supa actively participated in international women’s rights meetings, promoting her Native Quechua language. Notably, Supa made history by taking her parliamentary oath in Quechua, becoming Peru’s first parliamentarian to do so. She raised awareness about her community’s struggles at the United Nations and served as president of the Education Commission in Congress. After her term, she returned to her community to reopen a healing center for forcibly sterilized women and their communities.

Lorena Féres da Silva Telles is a historian, post-doctoral fellow with University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and with CLAS (Center for Latin American Studies) at the University of Pittsburgh. She holds a PhD in Social History from the University of São Paulo. Her research and publications focus on the history of African women and their descendants, gender, reproductive health, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, motherhood and medicine in slavery, and domestic work in the post-abolition period. She is the author of the books “Teresa Benguela and Felipa Crioula Were Pregnant: Motherhood and Slavery in Rio de Janeiro, 1830-1888” (Ed. Unifesp, 2022) and “Libertas among Townhouses: Black Women and Domestic Work in São Paulo 1880-1920” (Ed. Alameda, 2013). The PhD dissertation (Teresa Benguela and Felipa Crioula were pregnant: motherhood and slavery in Rio de Janeiro (19th century) was the winner of the Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Thesis Prize in Social Sciences by LASA (Latin American Studies Association), Brazil/2020 Section, and the Social History Award from the Postgraduate Program in Social History at USP, 2019 edition.

Belén Unzueta is a postdoctoral fellow at the Penn-Mellon Just Futures Initiative “Dispossessions in the Americas: the Extraction of Bodies, Land & Heritage from La Conquista to the Present.” She holds a PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University and an MA in Sociology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her research examines the process of ethnoracial categorization and classificatory systems in Latin America, ideas about indigeneity and attitudes towards indigenous rights, and the historical origins of ethnoracial inequality.

Charlotte Williams is a Mellon Democracy and Landscapes Initiative Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University (2024-2025) and a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research explores how archaeology as a discipline has been used in American Imperial projects, with a focus on how the United Fruit Company used archaeology to grow territorial power in Central America. Charlotte has worked on community museum projects in Belize and Peru, and co-curated an independent art exhibition in Philadelphia, Partage: the scars and sutures of the Colonial Museum (2023). Her work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Smithsonian, and the Penn-Mellon “Dispossessions in the Americas” Just Futures research initiative.

Researcher and collaborator focused on Andean and Indigenous politics. Areas of research include state formation, race-making and critical theory. George was a 2023-2024 Penn-Mellon ‘Just Futures’ Postdotoral Fellow ant the University of Pennsylvania.

Specialist in Delaware/Lenape culture, language, and traditional practices.