2027 Keynote

The keynote will be recorded and available on the conference website a week after the event concludes.

Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez

Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez is an Afro-Puerto Rican writer, teacher, and scholar from Hoboken, NJ. She is Professor of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies and is the Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at CUNY Hunter. She is author of the award-winning book Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020; translation, Editora Educación Emergente, 2023), co-editor of the exhibition catalog Diasporic Collage/Coastal Relations (CENTRO Press, 2025), and the forthcoming book, The Survival of a People (under contract with Duke University Press). Her published work can be found in Hypatia, Decolonization, CENTRO Journal, Small Axe, Frontiers Journal, Hispanofila, Contemporânea, Diálogos, and Feminist Formations. A first-generation high-school and college graduate, she earned her BA in English, Puerto Rican & Latino Studies, and Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick (Douglass College) and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. At her former institution, (Michigan State University) she founded the Mentoring Underrepresented Students in English Program (MUSE), the Womxn of Color Initiative, #ProyectoPalabrasPR, and the award-winning digital/material project Taller Electric Marronage. She is the PI of the 2022-2027 “Diaspora Solidarities Lab,” a $4M Mellon Higher Learning project focused on Black feminist digital humanities initiatives that support solidarity work in Black and Ethnic Studies and leads the CENTRO “Rooted and Relational” Initiative, a $6.48M project supported by the Mellon Presidential Initiatives.

Visit Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vasquez’s personal website.

Keynote co-sponsored by UW–Madison’s Puerto Rican Studies Hub, and by the UNESCO Co-Chair in the Center for Research on Gender and Women.