Dr. Aurora Vergara Figueroa, Universidad Icesi (Colombia)

Aurora Vergara Figueroa is the director of the Afrodiasporic Studies Center ( Centro de Estudios Afrodiaspóricos) at Icesi University. She is an Afrocolombian who holds a PhD from the Sociology Department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she concentrated on the sociological study of Afrocolombians deracinated from the Colombian Pacific coast and the long durée of land dispossession in the world-system. Also she develops research on the Afrodiasporic feminist movement in Colombia. She is the recipient of the LASA/OXFAM America 2014 Martin Diskin Dissertation Award and is currently working with Doctor Carmen Cosme Puntiel on a co-edited volume tentatively titled: Challenging Enslavement: Black Women’s Strategies of Resistance in Nueva Granada (Colombia), Venezuela, Brazil, and Cuba 1550-1900.

Her main research interests are: Feminist Critique, African Diaspora Studies, Sociological Theory, Critical Race Theory, Political Economy, Political Sociology, and Comparative Historical Sociology.