Yesenia Barragan is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. She specializes in the transnational history of race, gender, slavery, and emancipation in Afro-Latin America and the African diaspora in the Americas. Her current book project, Frontiers of Freedom: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific, is a social, political, and geographical study of the gradual abolition of chattel slavery and the post-emancipation era in the majority-black Colombian Pacific, the largest area in the Americas inhabited primarily by people of African descent.