A native of Puerto Rico, Yomaira was born and raised in Hoboken, NJ and is a first-generation high school and college graduate. She is Professor of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at CUNY Hunter and Directora of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO). She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and her B.A. in English, Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick (Douglass College). Prior to joinging the faculty at CUNY she was Associate Professor of Global Afro-Diaspora Studies in the department of English at Michigan State University.
She is the author of the award-winning monograph, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020) which examines the textual, historical, and political relations between diasporic Afro-Puerto Rican, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Dominican, and Equatoguinean literary poetics. Decolonizing Diasporas was translated into Spanish and published by Editora Educación Emergente in Puerto Rico in 2023. Her current book project, The Survival of a People (under contract with Duke University Press), examines the disappearances and excesses of Afro-Puerto Rican island and diasporic peoples through the study of familial stories, archival histories, photography, visual art, and film from the late 19th century to the present. Her published work can be found in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, the Journal of Decolonization, CENTRO Journal, Small Axe, Frontiers Journal, SX Salon, Hispanofilia, Contemporânea, Post-45 Contemporaries, Ethnic Studies Rise, Black Latinas Know, and Feminist Formations.
A scholar and organizer, she was a founder of the MSU Womxn of Color Initiative, collaborative study-away project #ProyectoPalabrasPR, and the digital/material site Taller Electric Marronage, and led the MSU Mentoring Underrepresented Scholars in English Program (MUSE) which seeks to advise and recruit promising prospective Ph.D. students in an effort to shift the discipline and study of English. She has has served in leadership roles for the Modern Languages Association (MLA), the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the American Studies Association (ASA), the Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA), and the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA).
Dr. Figueroa-Vásquez was a 2015-2017 Duke University SITPA Scholar, a 2017-2018 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, and a 2021-2022 Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellow. She is the PI and co-director for the Andrew W. Mellon funded “Diaspora Solidarities Lab,” a $2M Higher Learning project focused on Black feminist digital humanities initiatives that support solidarity work in Black and Ethnic Studies.