Franchesca Araújo is a doctoral candidate in African Diaspora studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an interdisciplinary Black Studies, Caribbeanist scholar. Her work interrogates the linkages and fissures between colonial modernity, nation-making, culture, and national subjecthood across a variety of media and histories. Her dissertation looks at how 20th and 21st century Dominican subjects, media, and events encounter the Dominican Republic’s classed, racialized, and spatialized value systems across different political and cultural moments. Using archival research, close reading, and visual, discursive, and reflexive analysis, she theorizes the analytics of deficiency, and excess at the intersection of black geographies and black disability studies. She argues this opens up more capacious ways to think about encounters between blackness, the nation, and the national subject. Franchesca’s research interests broadly include theorizing black geographies, Hispanophone Caribbean popular culture, music, performance, and aesthetics, 20th century anti-colonial Caribbean thought, and coloniality and anti-blackness within Latin American nation-making and Latinidad as an imagined community. Her poetry can be found in When Language Broke Open (University of Arizona Press), and her scholarship in The Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies as well as The Afro-Latin@* Reader: Vol 2 (Duke University Press).