Through our scientific and technological genius, we've made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment, we must make of it a brotherhood.
Background
Lorgia García Peña is an associate professor of Romance languages and literatures and of history and literature at Harvard University. García Peña earned her PhD in American studies with a specialization in Latino/a studies, from the University of Michigan. She earned an MA in Latin American literature and cultures from Rutgers University.
Interests
García Peña’s research interests include Latinx studies in global perspectives, Hispanic Caribbean literatures and cultures, performance studies, race and ethnicity, transnational feminism, migration, human rights, Dominican and Dominican diaspora studies.
Her most recent work, The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions studies the impact of stories, both historical and fictional, on the national and racial identity of a people. Offering the Dominican experience as case study, this book shows how the stories of a nation create marginality through acts of exclusion. These exclusionary acts are linked to the tensions between colonial desire and the aspiration for political independence. The book also shows how these official stories of exclusion, though influential in shaping a country’s identity, are always contested, negotiated, and even redefined through acts of resistance linked to the tensions between history — what is perceived as evidence of fact — and fiction — what is presumed to be invention: cultural productions, oral histories, and rumors.
News Items
Dr. Yomaira Figueroa “Intimacies”
MLK Visiting Scholar Lorgia García Peña responds to Figueroa's talk.
WGS Intellectual Forum: Lorgia García-Peña
The MLK Scholar presents a critique of Italian coloniality in the twentieth-first century through a transnational ethnic and critical race...
Josefina Baez: As Is E’
MLK Visiting Scholar Lorgia García Peña moderates a performative reading by Baez.
Day of Action: Screening of “Asmarina” and conversation with film director and Prof. Garcia Peña
The MLK scholar discusses a documentary about the Eritrean-Ethiopian diaspora in Italy.
MLTalks: Undocumented students, equal access to higher education, and Freedom University Georgia
A discussion of Freedom University Georgia, an experiment co-founded by MLK Scholar Lorgia García Peña.