Assistant Professor and Program Director of Africana Studies Paul Joseph López Oro recently participated in the 10th annual African American Intellectual History Society Conference. The theme of the conference was "Slavery and its Afterlives" and López Oro chaired and presented on Nichola R. Jones' new book, Cervantine Blackness. He was joined by Kinitra Brooks, Michigan State University; Todne Thomas, Yale University; Koritha Mitchell, Boston University; and Chad Leahy, University of Denver.
López Oro also recently led a discussion on the challenges students from diverse ethnic backgrounds face when talking about their sexual orientation and identity at home as part of the Women's Herstory Month programming at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
López Oro is a transdisciplinary Black Studies scholar whose teaching and research interests are on Black Latin American and U.S. Black Latinx social movements, Black diaspora theories and ethnographies, and Black Queer Feminisms. His research interests include Black politics in Latin America, the Caribbean and U.S. AfroLatinidades, Black Latinx LGBTQ movements and performances, and Black transnationalism. López Oro uses multi-sited archives, oral histories, film, social media, and critical ethnography to unearth the often understudied and undertheorized intellectual, political, spiritual, and cultural contributions embodied by Garifuna (Black Indigenous) women and queer-identified folks who are at the forefront of decades-long hemispheric movements of preserving Indigenous Blackness. His first book manuscript Indigenous Blackness: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York is a transdisciplinary ethnography on how gender and sexuality shape the ways in which transgenerational Garifuna New Yorkers of Central American descent negotiate, perform, and self-make their multiple subjectivities at the intersections of their Blackness/Indigeneity/Central American Caribbean Latinidad.