Esther Lezra is an Associate Professor in the Program for Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California of San Diego in 2005 and was awarded a two-year Fellowship from the University of California Office of the President under the mentorship of Susan Gillman and George Lipsitz. She has published in the journals Dissidences: A Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism,Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal and has an article in African Diasporas: Ancestors, Migrations and Boundaries, a collection edited by Robert Cancel and Winifred Woodhull. She recently published The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others: A Global Perspective (Routledge Publishing, 2014).

She specializes in the literary and cultural study of the Caribbean, Europe and North Africa from the eighteenth century to the present. Her book project explores questions of memory and forgetting in the multilingual archive of transatlantic revolutions and the submerged knowledges of Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories.