Jewel Pereyra

African American & Black Diaspora Studies

  • Education PhD., American Studies, Harvard University

Jewel Pereyra received her PhD in American Studies, with a concentration in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, from Harvard University. Her research and teaching engage 20th and 21st century Asian American and Afro-Asian diasporic literature and performance through relational ethnic studies frameworks, with a focus on histories of U.S empire and militarism, social and labor movements, and transnational feminisms. Her first book project, Afro-Filipina Aesthetics: Transnational Kinship Networks and Relational Performance, re-orients scholarship on Afro-Asian social movements and military histories of the Black Pacific by amplifying Filipina and Black feminist and queer performance genealogies across the long twentieth century. While at BU, she will also be at work on her second book project, No Requests: Filipina Inhospitality in Contemporary Performance, which studies how queer and feminist Filipina writers and artists draw on popular music—disco and rock—and critical uses of anger to critique the excess availability and extraction of overseas Filipina women’s domestic service and sex labor in the global makings of U.S. power. Her research has been supported by the U.S. Fulbright Program, the American Society for Theatre Research, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her writing also appears or is forthcoming in MELUS, Post45 Contemporaries, and Beyond the X: Queer and Trans Filipinx Studies, and in exhibitions in affiliation with Little Manila Queens and Tufts University Art Galleries.