About
 

Amarilys Estrella is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and a faculty affiliate for the Center for African and African American Studies and the Center for the Study of Women Gender and Sexuality at Rice University. She holds a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology and a Master’s in Latin America and Caribbean Studies from New York University. Her research interests broadly focus on the intersections of race and gender within transnational movements, Black Latin American and Latinx identity, as well as human rights and anti-racist activism. 
 

She is also a founding member of We Are All Dominican (WAAD), a collective of graduate students, educators, scholars, artists, activists, and community members of Dominican and Haitian descent who joined forces in October 2013 to denounce the Dominican Constitutional Tribunal’s decision, TC-0168/13, which stripped the nationality of more than four generations of Dominicans of Haitian.
 

Dr. Estrella’s work has been recognized for its contributions to the social sciences, humanities and the study of grassroots activism. She is the recipient of Duke University's 2022-2024 Summer Institute on Tenure and Professional Advancement Fellowship. Dr. Estrella and Dr. Victoria Massie were awarded the 2022-2024 Rice University's BRIDGE (Building Research on Inequality and Diversity to Grow Equity) grant for their project "Stressful Crossings: How Black Immigrants' Health is Immobilized in Houston." She was an 2020-2021 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Emerging Voices Fellow. She was part of the Mark Claster Mamolen Dissertation Workshop Class of 2019, administered by the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University. She was also a 2018-2019 Public Humanities Fellow for Humanities New York. In 2017, she received the Inter-American Foundation (IAF) Grassroots Development Fellowship for dissertation field research.

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