Lorgia García Peña is Mellon Professor of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University. Her research focuses on Blackness, colonialism, and migration with a special focus on Dominican diaspora. Her book The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradictions explores the effect of stories on national and racial identity. She is a co-founder of Atlanta’s Freedom University and co-director of a digital archival project entitled “Mind the Gap: Migration, Citizenship, and Archives of Justice.”

The 2021-2022 Altman Program invites the Miami University community to explore the persistence of racism in its cultural, political, and institutional forms. What is the history of race as an idea and a social category? How did it transform systems of law, administration, and representation into vehicles for subjugating entire groups of people? How does racism work today? What is its relation to systems of caste and meritocracy? To citizenship and mobility? How can emerging humanities scholarship help us interrogate its evolution and frustrating persistence? And what measures can we take to create a more inclusive and equitable society?