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Paul Joseph López Oro is a native son of Brooklyn, NY by way of the Caribbean Coast of Honduras. Trained as a transdisciplinary Black Studies scholar in the Department of African & African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin (2014-2020) and the Department of Black Studies (formerly-named African American Studies) at Northwestern University (2012-2014). His research and teaching focuses on Black Latin American political thought (cimarronaje, Black Indigeneity land politics, AfroLatinidades, and the afterlives of slavery & settler colonialism) and U.S. racial politics on Black Latinidades. As a first-generation, U.S. born son of the Black Indigenous isthmian diaspora, his worldview Black Central Americans in the United States is hemispheric and transnational. Methodologically grounded in Black Queer diaspora theories and ethnographies (embodied archives, ancestral memory, world-making kinship), and Black Queer Feminist thought (intersectionality, ungendering blackness, and Black women’s political & intellectual labor). 

In his first book with The Queer World Making Politics of Garifuna Nueva York is a transdisciplinary ethnographic study on how a maroon African Indigenous culture is preserved, survived, and transgenerationally inherited vis-a-vis Caribbean marronage, multiple overlapping hemispheric diasporas (the Middle Passage, Caribbean, Central America’s Caribbean Coasts, and the United States), exile, the anti-Blackness of Central American mestizaje, land dispossession, and U.S. imperialism on the isthmus and its diasporas. Closely examining oral histories, public performances, film, digital spaces, and creative works, Indigenous Blackness unearths new terrains of knowledge-production on Black Indigenous life in New York City. Grounded in Black Queer Feminist thought and practice, he argues that the world-making practices of Garifuna women and queer folks as politically curating and preserving Garinagu Black Indigeneity in New York City is a catalyst for unearthing new terrains of knowledge-production on Black Indigenous life in the Americas.

He is currently working on two co-edited volumes: The Afro-Latin@* Reader, Volume II (Duke University Press) with Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez Omaris Z. Zamora and Black Central América(s): Past, Present, and Future Black Hemispheric Worlds (Palgrave Macmillan, Afro-Latin@ Diaspora Series) with Kaysha Corinealdi, Natasha Gordon-Chipembere, and Nicole D. Ramsey. He serves on the editorial boards of , and the . He also serves as co-editor of the Palgrave Macmillan book series: with Natasha Gordon-Chipembere, Edward Paulino, and Nicole D. Ramsey. He has worked with the since 2009 and serves on their executive board. His writings can be found in Postmodern Culture: Journal of Interdisciplinary Thought on Contemporary Cultures, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, & NACLA Report on the Americas, and edited-volume book chapters with Oxford University Press, New York University Press, Rutgers University Press, Duke University Press, University of Pittsburgh Press, University of Arizona Press, and Palgrave Macmillan. He is currently underway with archival research for his second book project tentatively titled, Jim Crow’s Xenophobia: A Visual History of Black Migrations in the Americas, closely examining five different Black geographies in the Americas (Harlem/Puerto Rico, Philadelphia/Samana, DR, La Ceiba/New Orleans, Bluefields/Miami, and Colón/Brooklyn) at historical conjunctures of border crossing; at the intersections of anti-Black racism and xenophobia. This project is animated by lines of inquiries to what happens when Black communities migrate/immigrate/cross borders throughout the Americas, how does the nation-state relegate/articulate/dispossess their citizenship. Thinking alongside ideas of unfinished Black migrations, how does Blackness and Black people get articulate/signified/constructed at the intersections of anti-Black racism and xenophobia.

Professor López Oro began his teaching career in August 2006, as a Graduate Student Instructor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. After completing his master’s degree in Latin American Studies, he returned to his hometown as a Teach for America NYC 2009 corps to be a NYC Public school special/bilingual education classroom teacher in East Harlem. He has taught Black studies and Latinx studies courses at various institutions of higher education: Northwestern University, University of Texas at Austin; University of Virginia; New York University, University of Connecticut, City University of New York campuses of Hunter College, Lehman College, College of Staten Island, & Queens College; and most recently Smith College.

His research has been generously funded by the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program, Tinker Foundation Field Research Grant, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Interdisciplinary Cluster Fellowship in Latin American & Caribbean Studies, and the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies. He was awarded a 2017–2018 Dissertation Fellowship in the Department of Mexican American and Latino Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and a 2018-2020 Predoctoral Fellowship at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. During his time as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Smith College, he was awarded the 2021-2022 Miriam Jiménez Román Post-doctoral Fellowship at New York University’s The Latinx Project in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis and a 2022-2023 Visiting Research in Ethnic Studies at the Institute of American Cultures and the Chicano Studies Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles towards the completion of his first-book manuscript.

Selected Publications:

 Book Review of Transforming Anthropology: Journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists, Vol. 34, No. 1, (April 2026): pp. 94-95.

in Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America, edited by Patsy Lewis, Kristen Kolenz, and Alexandria Miller. Pp: 68-83. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2026).

  Co-Edited with Kaysha Corinealdi and Jorge Cuellar, NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. 57, No. 2, (June 2025): pp. 119-253.

in Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability, edited by Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar and Hector Nicolás Ramos Flores. Pp: 211-226. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press).

Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Vol. 66, No. 3, (November 2021): pp: 134-146.