Paola Vargas Arana Author

Paola Vargas Arana is a historian and anthropologist whose research explores African and African-descendant knowledge in the Atlantic world. She examines the sustainability of food systems and ideas of freedom within slavery and post-slavery societies. Her work foregrounds African women’s agency and their contributions to agrarian production and food economies, challenging the marginalisation of African women in economic history. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, she analyses how agrarian and culinary knowledge underpinned maroon autonomy. She has held a British Academy Newton International Fellowship at King’s College London and an Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. She is currently Research Associate in History at the University of Manchester.