Jessica Nogueira Varela is an Afro-Brazilian doctoral candidate in Comparative Gender Studies at the Central European University. In 2025, Jessica co-led and co-organized two events: the roundtable "Global Blackness and Decolonial Black Feminisms," at CEU (Vienna) and online, the collaborative event "Academic Freedom Under Attack: A Transatlantic Conversation," between Yale University, CEU, and other higher education institutions in the US and Europe. In March 2024, Jessica co-organized the hybrid symposium "Memory, Resistance and Colonial Hierarchies of Belonging (A)cross the Atlantic” between Bard College and CEU. In 2022, she visited the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University. She recently published "Delinking Blackness: Black Feminist and Decolonial Theories in Dialogue." Jessica published the piece "On the Shore Autoethnography and Reflexivity from a Black Feminist and Decolonial Perspective," part of the edited volume Investigating Cultures of Equality, edited by Dorota Golańska, Aleksandra M. Różalska, and Suzanne Clisby; published by Routledge in 2022. Jessica graduated with a Master of Arts in 2020. In 20204 she published the online article “Since We are Germans, We Demand Equality”: Black Germans’ Quest(s) for Full Citizenship (1884 – 1921) after becoming fascinated with the ways through which citizenship claims were being articulated by black Germans in the late 19th century (https://cz.boell.org/en/node/2965). She was a scholarship recipient for GEMMA – Erasmus Mundus + Master’s Degree in Gender and Women’s Studies, graduating from the Central European University (CEU) and the University of Łódź, in Poland. Jessica has a teaching and a bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences from the Federal University of Ceará in Brazil. Jessica presented her work at the Third “Transforming Identities” Workshop, organized by the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Stavanger in 2020, and the Decolonised Futures Conference 2021, organized by St. Mary’s University, Twickenham London, the RINGS 8th Annual Conference: Decolonising Feminisms at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in Durban, South Africa, 2022, and in 2025 the "African Cosmologies across the Atlantic: Literary, Linguistic, Artistic and Cultural Representations AISCLI Two-Day Seminar University “G. d’Annunzio” of Chieti–Pescara, Italy". Jessica’s main fields of interest are Black Feminism, Decolonial Theory, Digital Research Methods for the Humanities, and Migration Studies in Contemporary Europe. As a PhD candidate based in Austria and affiliated with black European digital archives initiatives such as InBEST, Jessica seeks to build connections with black and digital research scholars across Europe. In 2025, Jessica received a travel grant from CLARIAH-AT to present the DH component of her ongoing dissertation research. She is highly interested in the value of DH for amplifying marginalized intellectual histories in Europe.
Jessica facilitated a free and open-to-the-public online reading group that focuses on the intellectual and activist legacies of black women in Western Europe. The group was titled "A People's Art is the Genesis of Their Freedom"