Africana Colloquium 2024

The Department of Africana Studies invites you to our 11th Annual Graduate Student Colloquium, "Black Queer Placemaking: Methods, Histories, Diasporas”.

For reasons of space, we encourage community members not affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania to join us via Zoom.

Paul Joseph López Oro, Ph.D.:

Dr. Paul Joseph López Oro is a transdisciplinary Black Studies scholar whose research and teaching interests are at the intersections of Black Latin American/U.S. AfroLatinx social movements, Black Queer Feminist ethnographies & theories in the Américas, and transnational Black LGBTQ+ activism and political mobilizations. He is currently working on his book manuscript Indigenous Blackness: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York is a critical ethnography that examines how gender and sexuality queerly shape the ways in which transgenerational Garifuna New Yorkers of Central American descent negotiate, articulate, perform, and contradict their multiple subjectivities as Black/Indigenous/Central American Caribbean peoples. Dr. López Oro is currently an Assistant Professor and Director of the Africana Studies Program at Bryn Mawr College.

Chrystel Oloukoï:

Chrystel Oloukoï is an artist, film critic and curator, broadly interested in experimental cinema, queer cinema and Black continental and diasporic cinema. They hold a BA and MA in Geography from the University Paris 1 - with concentrations in Social Anthropology, Critical Media Practice and Women Gender and Sexuality, and are a predoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia (UVA). Their dissertation “Black Nocturnal: Ecologies of the Night in Lagos” explores imaginations of the night in Lagos and the afterlives of colonial technologies of temporal discipline.

J.T. Roane, Ph.D.:

J.T. Roane is assistant professor of Africana Studies and Geography and Andrew W. Mellon chair in Global Racial Justice in the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and he is a 2008 graduate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. His book Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place was published in 2023 with New York University Press. Roane's short experimental film Plot received support from Princeton's Crossroads Fellowship. He also currently serves as a member of Just Harvest—Tidewater, an Indigenous and Black led organization building toward food sovereignty and justice in Virginia’s historical plantation region through political and practical education. He is a 2023-2024 Visiting Scholar at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard.