- Evelyn Saavedra Autry
- Position:
Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
- Bio:
Dr. Evelyn Saavedra Autry is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and serves as an Early Career Faculty Fellow at The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of gender, coloniality, and indigeneity whose work is located at the intersections of cultural studies, history, and literature. Her area of research is contemporary Latin America, mainly the Andean region of Peru. Drawing on decolonial theory, Indigenous feminism, and interdisciplinary methods, such as qualitative research, content analysis, and archival research, her scholarship explores cultural productions authored by Indigenous women and femmes to examine Andean identity formations as sites of memory, resistance, and cultural resurgence. Her current book project, Archives of Coloniality and Indigenous Resurgence: Race, Gender, and Violence in Narratives of the Andes (under contract with The University of North Carolina Press), offers a sweeping, multidisciplinary study of Andean Indigenous women’s cultural representations from the colonial period to the present. The book traces histories of objectification alongside strategies of survival, resistance, and resurgence, constructing a genealogy of gender-based violence that exposes the enduring legacies of colonial power in Peru. Dr. Saavedra Autry’s scholarship has earned wide recognition. Her article “Singing Feminist Ch’ixi+Art Music from las Rajaduras: Renata Flores, Isqun, and the Fractured Locus” received the 2023 National Women’s Studies Association Paper Award. Her article “Insurgent Memories of War: Self-Representation by Female Ex-Combatants in Peru” was published in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism and received the Paula J. Giddings Best Article Award in 2026.
