Aisha FinchDirector of Graduate Studies- WGSSAssociate Professor - WGSS

Aisha Finch is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Her research lies at the intersection of Black feminist knowledge production, decolonial thought, and studies of slavery and colonialism in the Atlantic World. In bringing together these fields, she draws from transnational, decolonial, and diasporic feminist praxes to understand the ways in which everyday people disrupt systems of power, envision just futures, and practice aliveness and care. As a historian of the African Diaspora, her work broadly explores Black practices of freedom, sovereignty, resistance, and fugitivity in the Caribbean and Latin America, as well as the U.S. South. Her research has explored the manifold challenges to slavery, colonialism, and anti-Black violence in Cuba and the Atlantic World, as well as enslaved people’s political, epistemological, and embodied refusals of the plantation world. In so doing, her work carefully considers the ways in which transnational genealogies of Black feminism engender alternative readings of colonial archives. Her teaching grounds students in these radical histories of the Caribbean, Latin America, and the African Diaspora, and the legacy of these histories in the current moment. 

 

Professor Finch is the author of Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844, which received the Harriet Tubman Prize from the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture, and the co-editor of Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation: The Afro-Cuban Fight for Freedom and Equality, 1812-1912. Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the UC Office of the President. Her current book project explores the conjuncture of transnational Black feminist activism and the historical memory of marronage. This project asks what can be learned from the experiences of enslaved women and fugitive collectives who fled the plantation world of the Hispanophone Caribbean, and the engagement of Black feminists and racial justice activists in Latin America with these maroon histories as they confront violence, coloniality, and anti-Blackness in the contemporary moment.