Macarena Gómez-Barris is the Pratt Institute Chair of Department of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies. She is author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) and Towards a Sociology of a Trace, co-edited with Herman Gray (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Her forthcoming book is The Extractive Zone: Submerged Perspectives and Decoloniality (Duke University Press), which analyzes five regions within South America. In this book, Macarena attends to how social and ecological life resists the practices of extractive capitalism through social and visual activisms, especially upon indigenous territories.

Macarena received a Fulbright Research Fellowship in 2014-2015, and was visiting professor at FLACSO-Ecuador in the Department of Sociology and Gender Studies. Most recently, she was an Associate Professor at the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Macarena researches and teaches on culture, memory, violence, race, social theory and decolonization in the Américas. She will bring all of these experiences to Pratt Institute where she will launch a multidisciplinary research initiative based in the Department of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies.