After Harvard denied Dr. Lorgia García Peña tenure, students and scholars all over the country launched a campaign to demand answers from the university. Now, scholars launch Ethnic Studies Rise and organize #LorgiaFest in an effort to create awareness about the need for ethnic studies. In an unprecedented social media event, organizers are asking Twitter users to participate in #LorgiaFest and tweet a passage or passages of Dr. García-Peña’s book, The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (Duke University Press, 2016), that they find meaningful and create a thread below the tweet informing fellow Twitter users why the passage is significant to them. Participants are encouraged to use the hashtag #LorgiaFest.

#LorgiaFest will go live on Twitter at 2pm EST on Friday, December 20, 2019

“Ethnic Studies Rise” is a public humanities effort to honor the extraordinary contributions of scholar Dr. Lorgia García Peña, the Roy G. Clouse Associate Professor of Romance Languages at Harvard University. It is a platform to promote wide public engagement with her work, and, more broadly, with Ethnic Studies and associated areas of study.

We will accomplish this in two ways: First, via an Ethnic Studies Rise online roundtable that will provide resources and entry points to consider the importance of Ethnic Studies to contemporary thought worldwide. Second, via LorgiaFest, we will share, re-center, and curate a discussion of Dr. García Peña’s award-winning book, The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (Duke University Press, 2016), in an effort to raise awareness of its key insights among wider audiences.

In engaging with Dr. García Peña’s work, we also recognize and honor all the Ethnic Studies scholars who have encountered resistance and retaliation for their timely work, and the students who need them and fight daily for epistemological insurrection, academic freedom, and justice in the US academy. The site offers a public space for dialogues about Ethnic Studies and related fields, a resource for students organizing on campuses, to be sure, but also for anyone who wants to learn more about Ethnic Studies work and build with and from it. We know Ethnic Studies came to the university from communities outside the university, and we honor that longer history by creating this public-facing website and the connected social media event, LorgiaFest.

We have invited a team of distinguished and experienced scholars to reflect on the importance of Ethnic Studies and its relationship to American Studies and other established interdisciplinary fields of study, such as Black Studies, Latinx Studies, Indigenous Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Women’s Studies. Last but not least, we have asked them to illuminate the nature of Dr. Lorgia García Peña’s timely and original contribution to these fields. The exchanges are happening in paired and moderated email conversations, and will be curated and uploaded to the Ethnic Studies Rise website. Moderated comments will be open for a limited time after publication to allow the public to participate in the conversation.

These conversations will connect to LorgiaFest. During LorgiaFest we invite everyone to read or revisit Dr. García Peña’s book, The Borders of Dominicanidad, which Duke University Press, the publisher, has made freely available in its e-book format until January 15th, 2020, and at 30% discount for the print version (use coupon code E19GRCIA at checkout). On Friday, December 20, beginning at 2pm EST, we invite readers to tweet, using the hashtag #lorgiafest, passages of her book that they find particularly meaningful, and then create a thread below the tweet to explain why they find them meaningful. This public portion of the event will be moderated by Dr. Raj Chetty (@rajchettysju), Assistant Professor of Black Literature and Culture at San Diego State University, and Dr. Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann (@malamanuense), Assistant Professor of Latin American, Caribbean and U.S Latinx Literature at Emerson College.

For more information, contact: lorgiafest@gmail.com, Raj Chetty, (347) 567-3685; Alex Gil; or Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann.

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