Dr. Suzanne C. Persard (PhD, Emory University) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Critical Race, Gender and Culture Studies at American University and Faculty Affiliate for the Antiracist Research and Policy Center. Born and raised in Bronx, New York to parents from Kingston, Jamaica, Persard is an interdisciplinary scholar and writer whose research and cultural criticism center gender, sexuality and the colonial archive with a focus on Indian indentureship in the Caribbean and its diasporas. Her scholarship includes publications about theories of decoloniality; queer archives and (post-) indenture visual culture; and Indo-Jamaican performance and historiography. Forthcoming scholarship includes book chapters on gender and Indian indentureship in the Caribbean from Routledge, Oxford University Press and Pressees Universitaires Indianocéaniques.

Persard was the curator of Remnants of Another, the first group exhibition of Indo-Caribbean visual artists in the United States, at Twelve Gates Gallery in Philadelphia featuring artists of indentured Indian descent from Guyana, Surname and Trinidad working in the Netherlands, Canada and the U.S. The exhibit also featured a special homage to the Indian Talent Merrymakers of Jamaica and a solo album from the singer Azim Beharrie.

A founding member of Jahajee Sisters, the first Indo-Caribbean organization committed to ending gender based violence, Persard was profiled for her activism and writing by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. Her public writing appears in The Huffington Post; Scroll.in; Slate Magazine; and The Margins, among other publications. Her poetry is forthcoming in the Indo-Caribbean anthology I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations and Chutney Fractals (Kaya Press, 2024), and has appeared in international anthologies, chapbooks and as part of museum exhibits in New York City and the Netherlands. She was the recipient of two writing residencies from Hedgebrook in Seattle and Mumbai, as well as the recipient of a poetry prize from the journal Small Axe.

With a commitment to archiving and amplifying the history of Indian indentureship in the United States, Persard has served as an acquisitions advisor to the Indo-Caribbean Collection at the University of Pennsylvania, which is the first collection of its kind in the U.S. She is the curator of Queer x Indenture, a transnational series funded by a Mellon Humanities Interventions grant at Emory University featuring artists, scholars and oral historians from throughout the indentured diaspora. Persard also curates two digital humanities projects on archiving indentured diaspora stories and ephemera.

As a a former activist, Persard organized in social justice movements for over a decade. She was a former support group facilitator for LGBT Caribbean women and trans individuals and served as a support group facilitator for SALGA in New York City. From 2014-2019, Persard served as an expert advisor to Amnesty International in the role of LGBT Thematic Specialist. During this period, she represented the rights of sexual and gender minorities on behalf of Amnesty International at the United Nations; authored issue briefs on abuses against transgender women incarcerated in the U.S. prison system and conversion therapy used against LGBT youth in the United States. For years, she worked closely with legal clinics throughout the country, providing expert statements to LGBT asylum-seekers the Caribbean, Central America and South Asia. Persard also served as a Rapporteur to The Carter Center during the 2018 Human Rights Defenders Forum presided over by President Jimmy Carter.