Our Founders
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 Afro-Diaspora Studies in the department of African American, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at CUNY Hunter and is the Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO). She is author of the award-winning book Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern 2020; translated to Spanish by Editora Educación Emergente 2023) and the forthcoming book, The Survival of a People (under contract with Duke University Press).
Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson
Jessica Marie Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University and a former fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of the award-winning book Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020). Jessica has two forthcoming books with Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton examining Black women's engagement with history of slavery.
Jessica is Founding Curatrix at African Diaspora, Ph.D. or #ADPhD (africandiasporaphd.com), co-organizer of the Queering Slavery Working Group with Dr. Vanessa Holden (University of Kentucky), a member of the LatiNegrxs Project (lati-negros.tumblr.com), and a Digital Alchemist at the Center for Solutions to Online Violence (http://femtechnet.org/csov/). At Johns Hopkins University, Johnson co-convener of the Black World Seminar (launch: Fall 2019) with Drs. Nathan Connolly, Larry Jackson, and Martha Jones as well as convener of the Sex and Slavery Lab (2018-2019). She is on the board of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies.
She is guest editor of Slavery in the Machine, a special issue of sx:archipelagos (2019) and co-editor with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University) of Black Code: A Special Issue of the Black Scholar (2017). Her work has appeared in Slavery & Abolition,The Black Scholar, Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism, American Quarterly, Social Text, The Journal of African American History, the William & Mary Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, Forum Journal, Bitch Magazine, Black Perspectives (AAIHS), Somatosphere and Post-Colonial Digital Humanities (DHPoco) and her book chapters have appeared in multiple edited collections.
As a historian and Black Studies scholar, Johnson researches black diasporic freedom struggles from slavery to emancipation. Johnson is an internationally recognized digital humanist. Johnson is the Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure and Senior Research Associate with the Center for the Digital Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Johnson is PI of Black Beyond Data, a Black studies computational and social sciences lab, with co-PIs Kim Gallon and Alexandre White. Alongside Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa, Johnson also co-directs the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, a Mellon-funded multi-university initiative applying Black feminist methodologies to collaborative scholarship. Johnson's essay, "Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads" is widely recognized as a ground-breaking intervention in the fields of Black studies, digital humanities and data science. Johnson is co-editor with Lauren Tilton and David Mimno of Debates in the Digital Humanities: Computational Humanities. She was guest editor of Slavery in the Machine, a special issue of archipelagos journal (2019) and co-editor with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University) of Black Code: A Special Issue of the Black Scholar (2017).
A native of Puerto Rico, Yomaira was born and raised in Hoboken, NJ and is a first-generation high school and college graduate. She earned her B.A. in English, Puerto Rican & Hispanic Caribbean Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick (Douglass College) and her Ph.D. and M.A. in the department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. At UC Berkeley she was the project coordinator for the Women of Color Initiatives Project and was a member of the Afro-Latin@ Working Group and the Decolonial Feminist Working Group. She is a founder of the MSU MUSE Program, MSU Womxn of Color Initiative, #ProyectoPalabrasPR, and the digital/material project Taller Electric Marronage. She is the PI for the 2022-2024 Andrew W. Mellon funded “Diaspora Solidarities Lab,” a $2M Higher Learning project focused on Black feminist digital humanities initiatives that support solidarity work in Black and Ethnic Studies.
She is has served on forum and section leadership roles for the Modern Languages Association (MLA), the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the American Studies Association (ASA), and the Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA), and is the former Vice President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA). Her research has been generously funded by the UC Berkeley Chancellor's Fellowship, the Metro New York Leader's Fellowship, the UC Berkeley Dean's Normative Time Fellowship, the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Departmental and 5th Account Grants, and the Ford Foundation. She is part of the inaugural cohort of the Duke University Mellon Mays SITPA Scholar Fellowship Program, was awarded a 2017-2018 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship, was a 2017-2018 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, and was a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University from 2021-2022.In 2023 Yomaira was named the director of CENTRO, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at CUNY Hunter. CENTRO is the largest and most important research institute in Puerto Rican studies in the diaspora.
Yomaira was featured in the 2017 MSU College of Arts & Letters Dean's Report. Her 2018 interview on Left of Black can be viewed here, her 2019 interview on the Liberal Arts Endeavor podcast can be heard here, and the episode of the Cite Black Women podcast on Black Women’s Intellectual Contributions to the Americas and Sylvia Wynter can be found here.