Barnard Faculty Fellows

Palomo Rodrigo Gonzales

Anthropology

Paloma Rodrigo Gonzales is a cultural anthropologist whose interdisciplinary research engages embodiment, visual cultures, critical race theory, and decolonial science and technology studies to examine how bodies come to signify racial difference. She has worked with human rights, Indigenous rights, and environmental organizations in Peru. Rodrigo Gonzales has held fellowships at New York University’s College of Arts and Science, the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (CUNY), and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. Her research has been supported by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation and the Council on Library and Information Resources Mellon Fellowship. She earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from The Graduate Center, CUNY, and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of California, San Diego. Rodrigo Gonzales brings to Barnard more than seven years of teaching experience in courses on anthropological theory, embodiment, racialization, intersectionality, interdisciplinarity, Spanish, and Latin America.

Daria Reavan

American Studies

Daria Reaven is an interdisciplinary scholar and ethnographer of the carceral state and legal history. Informed by seven years of experience working as a criminal defense investigator on death penalty appellate cases, her current research traces a genealogy of legal mercy in Virginia—from slavery-era legal reforms to Richmond’s contemporary criminal courtrooms—to show how practices of clemency and absolution consolidate racialized forms of state power. Her work is grounded in a commitment to publicly engaged, collaborative research that supports communities challenging systems of punishment. Daria completed her PhD in American Studies at New York University in 2025 and joins Barnard as an Early-Career Faculty Fellow, where she serves as an advisory board member for the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Her scholarship and teaching at Barnard will contribute to work on legal thought, culture, and the history of punishment in the American south.

Aurelis Troncoso

Africana Studies 

Aurelis Troncoso (they/them), holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Troncoso’s research focuses on the transnational experiences of trans, femmes, non-binary and LGBTQ+ practitioners of Santeria and Espiritismo in Puerto Rico and how practitioners negotiate race, nationality, queerness and transness within sacred spaces. Their work also extends to Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Dr. Troncoso is a Senior Research Fellow of the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, a multi-institutional Black feminist partnership that supports solidarity work in Black and Ethnic studies led by Drs. Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez and Jessica Marie Johnson, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Dr. Troncoso was the 2024-2025 Miriam Jiménez Román post-doctoral fellow at New York University, honoring the legacy of Dr. Miriam Jiménez Román– a pioneer in Afro-Latinx studies. Dr. Troncoso joins Barnard College as the Early-Career Faculty Fellow in the Africana Studies Department, their scholarship here continues to center Black Latinx queer and trans* experiences within Afro-Diasporic religions, ushering a vital and necessary component of Afro-Latinx embodied knowledge production. Troncoso offers courses on the wide-range plethora of Afro- diasporic religions in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Afro-Latinx diaspora in the United States. Troncoso’s forthcoming publications include their book manuscript Queering Orishas: Embodied Knowledges & Living Archives, a robust chapter in the upcoming Afro- Latin@* Reader: Volume 2, and a peer-review journal article in Columbia University’s SOULS Journal. Dr. Troncoso joins a legacy of scholar-practitioners committed to centering Blackness, queerness and spirituality in a larger effort to advance Afro-Latinx Studies and Religious Studies.