The 2027-28 Warren Center Faculty Fellowship will be on the theme of Afrolatinidades in Transnational Perspective led by Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof (Harvard History) and Yanilda Gonzalez (Harvard Kennedy School).

From its origins in the comparative study of slavery and of “race relations” in the decades after World War II, the comparative study of race, politics, and mobilization in the Americas has blossomed as it has abandoned initial hypotheses around the lesser severity of slavery in Latin America and the supposed lack of racial discrimination in that region. The burgeoning of the field of Afro-Latin American Studies and the move, in the United States, away from the study of race relations towards the study of racial formation, has allowed for a more robust comparative conversation about the local expressions of racial identity and racial politics. No longer strictly comparative, the field of comparative race in the Americas increasingly attends to diasporic interplay—the sharing of ideas, cultures, and strategies— among Afrodescendant populations in varied local and national contexts. Perhaps no social process provides a clearer window onto this interplay, and its dissonances, than the invention of new forms of Afro-Latinidad generated by the mobility of Afrodescendant people, moving between the English- and French-speaking parts of the Americas to Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions and between Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions and the United States.

Meanwhile, the study of Latinidad in the United States has evolved complexly from its origins in the labor activism of the middle 20th century and the Chicano and Puerto Rican campus movements of the early 1970s. In part, the field has grown larger and more varied to reflect the dramatic growth and increasing diversity of Latin American origin populations in the United States. As the idea that there exists a single, relatively uniform, Hispanic group became useful, government agencies, marketing companies, and some national advocacy groups invested in more social scientific research on that group. The interdisciplinary ethnic studies traditions on campuses evolved towards pan-ethnicity, seeking strength in numbers and in solidarity, while also maintaining a critical analysis of the bureaucratic “invention of Hispanics.” Since the 1990s, scholars, have asked how Hispanicity and Latinidad in the United States function akin to, and in dialogue with, nationalism in Latin America, sometimes effecting the erasure of Blackness and the marginalization of Afrodescendant people, sometimes appropriating Afro-Latin American culture, sometimes providing the terrain on which, or against which, Afrodescendants invent new forms of cultural expression, politics, and mobilization. Recent transnational discussions around Afro-Latinidades – from the United States to the Southern Cone – have ranged from policy debates regarding the formal measurement of Afrodesdendant populations in national census and race-based quotas, to demands for historical reparations and contemporary interest representation.

We invite applications from scholars in any discipline who are thinking about Afro-Latinidades historically, at the intersections of Afro-Latin America, global Black studies, and US Ethnic Studies.

For more information, see http://warrencenter.fas.harvard.edu/.

Applicants may not be degree candidates and should have a Ph.D. or equivalent. Fellows have library privileges and an office for the 9-month academic year. The Center encourages applications consistent with the seminar theme and qualified applicants who can contribute, through their research and service, to the excellence of the community. Stipends: individually determined according to fellow needs and Center resources, up to a maximum of $66,000. Note that recent average stipends have been in the range of $50,000.

PROJECT TITLE AND STATEMENT: Upload a three page project statement(double-spaced)) into the “Statement of Research” document slot. Do not attach lengthy materials compiled for other grant applications.

RECOMMENDATION LETTERS: Three letters of reference are required. Instructions will follow as you complete the electronic application. Deadline for recommendation letters is December 17, 2026.

Taylor Maurice
Assistant Director
Charles Warren Center
Emerson Hall, 4th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02138
617-495-3591

$60,000 to $69,000