Dr. Evelyn Saavedra Autry is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. She earned her Ph.D. in Latin American Studies along with a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Georgia. Her scholarship bridges multiple fields of knowledge, centering Indigenous epistemologies in dialogue with decolonial and feminist pedagogies, literary and cultural studies, and feminist theory. Through this interdisciplinary lens, her work examines Andean women’s 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 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. At the same time, it challenges dominant frameworks that cast Indigenous women solely as passive victims. By integrating literary analysis, decolonial feminist theory, historical inquiry, and Indigenous epistemologies, the project rethinks how violence, memory, and resurgence are represented in cultural texts—and how these representations shape understandings of Indigenous womanhood.

Dr. Saavedra Autry’s scholarship has been widely recognized. 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, the most prestigious honor in her field. Her article “Insurgent Memories of War: Self-Representation by Female Ex-Combatants in Peru” was published in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism by Duke University Press (Spring 2025). She is also the author of “Construcción de identidades femeninas andinas” (Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies) and “Testimonio, ficción y las batallas por las memorias en Insensatez” (Vernacular).

Her earlier work spans colonial studies and the Peruvian avant-garde, including “Mitos fundacionales en los Comentarios Reales de los Incas” (Caracoles), “El pobre más rico: heterogeneidad y transculturación en el teatro quechua colonial” (Lamar Journal), and “Magda Portal: procesos de modernización, vanguardismo y compromiso” (Entre Caníbales). The latter has been recognized as an essential study in Magda Portal: Bibliografía Esencial.