Paul Joseph López Oro

Dr. Paul Joseph 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. He is working on his first book manuscript, Indigenous Blackness: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York, is a transdisciplinary ethnographic study analyzing oral histories, performances, social media, film, literary texts and visual cultures to unearth the political, intellectual, cultural and spiritual genealogies of Garifuna women and subaltern geographies of Garifuna LGBTQ+ folks at the forefront of Garifuna transnational movements in New York City. Indigenous Blackness offers new ways to approach hemispheric questions on the multiple ways in which Garifuna New Yorkers of Central American descent queerly negotiate, perform, contradict and articulate their Black, Indigenous and Central American Caribbean subjectivities.

Dr. López Oro received his doctorate in African and African diaspora studies from the University of Texas at Austin, his master’s degree in African American studies from Northwestern University, his master’s degree in Latin American studies from the University of New Mexico and his bachelor’s degree in history from St. John’s University. He has taught Black studies and Latinx studies courses at The University of Texas at Austin; Hunter College, The City University of New York; University of Virginia; John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, and Smith College.

His research has been generously funded by the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program, Tinker Foundation Field Research Grant, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Interdisciplinary Cluster Fellowship in Latin American & Caribbean Studies, and the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies. He was awarded a 2017–2018 Dissertation Fellowship in the Department of Mexican American and Latino Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and a 2018-2020 Predoctoral Fellowship at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. And most recently, was the 2022-2023 Visiting Research in Ethnic Studies at the Institute of American Cultures and the Chicano Studies Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.