CLLAS Faculty Research Presentation

180 PLC, University of Oregon

Join CLLAS for our first 2022 faculty research presentation: “Becoming Heritage: Recognition, Exclusion, and the Politics of Black Cultural Heritage in Colombia.” Maria Fernanda Escallón (Department of Anthropology) will share her work on March 3, 2022, 3:30-5pm.

This in-person event will take place in 180 PLC. Masks are required. Attendance will be capped at 100.

Photo by Maria Fernanda Escallón

Maria Fernanda Escallón is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. She was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, where she completed a BA and MA in Anthropology and Archaeology at the Universidad de Los Andes. In 2016 she completed her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University. Before starting her doctorate, she worked in sustainable development and heritage policy-making for non-governmental organizations and Colombian public entities, including the Ministry of Culture and Bogotá’s Secretary of Culture and Tourism.

Maria Fernanda is interested in cultural heritage, race, diversity politics, ethnicity, and inequality in Latin America. Prior to joining the Anthropology Department at the University of Oregon, she was a 2015-2016 Dissertation Fellow in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. She has conducted field research in Colombia for over 10 years analyzing how and why certain multicultural policies that are ostensibly inclusive, can end up replicating, rather than dismantling, inequality and segregation across Latin America. Her latest book “Becoming Heritage: Recognition, Exclusion, and the Politics of Black Cultural Heritage in Colombia” is currently under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Her research has received support from a variety of sources, including the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council, the Fulbright Program, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Her most recent work appears in Cultural Anthropology, the International Journal of Cultural Property and the International Journal of Heritage Studies.

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