Christopher Loperena

Christopher Loperena is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research examines Indigenous and Black territorial struggles, land, environmental loss, extractivism, and the socio-spatial politics of economic development. He has also published on anthropological witnessing and cultural expertise. His book, The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras, was published by Stanford University Press in 2022. Loperena’s work has appeared in journals such as American Anthropologist, American Quarterly, Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Geoforum, and the Journal of Sustainable Tourism. In addition to his scholarship, he has provided expert testimony at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and in support of asylum claimants from Central America. In 2022, he was awarded a Mellon New Directions Fellowship to begin a project on race, loss, and climate vulnerability in coastal regions of Puerto Rico.