Jessica Nogueira Varela is an Afro-Brazilian doctoral candidate in Comparative Gender Studies at the Central European University. In 2024, Jessica co-organized a one-day international symposium titled “Memory, Resistance and Colonial Hierarchies of Belonging (A)cross the Atlantic,” Dr. Jana Schmidt at Bard College (NY) https://hac.bard.edu/memory-resistance-and-colonial-hierarchies-of-belon…The symposium discussed memory-making, trauma, and resistance amid legacies of colonialism, building from her dissertation project. Jessica recently discussed German colonialism and black Germans’ fight for full citizenship from 1888 until 1921 through an article published by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Institution in Prague https://cz.boell.org/en/node/2965 She was the 2022/23 recipient of the Sedgwick-Miller research fellowship at Cornell University. In 2023, she published a chapter titled “Autobiographical Flesh: Understanding Western Notions of Humanity through the Life and selected writings of Una Marson (1905–1965),” part of the edited collection Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe, an open-access publication by Routledge, edited by Elisabeth L. Engebretsen and Mia Liinason. Jessica’s main fields of interest are Black Feminism, Decolonial Theory, Critical Race Studies, and Migration Studies.

Jessica is currently facilitating a free and open-to-the-public online reading group focusing on black women’s writings titled ““A People’s Art is the Genesis of their Freedom”: Reclaiming Space, Rethinking Europe.” For more information, please, see: https://linktr.ee/poetryforthepoliticalimag