Jewel Pereyra

Academic Year 2026-2027
Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow
Jewel Pereyra smiling at the photographer while standing in front of green trees

Jewel Pereyra is a Society of Fellows postdoctoral scholar and lecturer at Boston University. She received her PhD in American Studies, with a concentration in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, from Harvard University.  Her writing has appeared in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, MELUS, Post45 Contemporaries, and in exhibitions in affiliation with Little Manila Queens and Tufts University Art Galleries.

Dreamed Dwelling: A Memory Reconstruction of Afro-Filipina Relational Aesthetics

Jewel Pereyra’s fellowship project is Dreamed Dwelling: Archiving Afro-Filipina Relational Aesthetics. It re-orients scholarship on Afro-Asian social movements and military histories of the Black Pacific by amplifying Filipina and Black feminist and queer performance genealogies and friendships across the long twentieth century. Dreamed Dwelling centers the lives of Filipina and Black feminine performers and argues that their friendships, theatrics, and experiments with poetry, music, and fashion were central to their revolutionary politics at the nexus of U.S. and European empires and Global South movements for decolonization and women’s and queer liberation.