Paulina Aroch Fugellie is Professor in the Department of Humanities of the Division of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) Cuajimalpa Campus. She is dedicated to the critique of ideology from the perspective of the global South, with an emphasis on Africa and Latin America. She is a member of the National System of Researchers (SNI) with level II in the area VI Social Sciences.

Before joining UAM, she was Visiting Professor at The Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where she worked on artivism and the concept of value in political economy, semiotics, and contemporary art (2012-13). In 2010, she earned a Ph.D. in Humanities at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA, University of Amsterdam) with a thesis on critical and postcolonial theories exploring the epistemological potentials and ideological engagements of theoretical production in the global North, Africa, and Latin America. She received her Master´s in African Studies from the Colegio de México, and her B.A. in English Literature from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She has also studied theater for more than eight years in various institutions and has participated in film and theater productions in Mexico and Holland.

In her academic work, she combines tools from philosophy, literature, discourse analysis, semiotics, theater, psychoanalytic theory, political economy, and postcolonial and decolonial theories. The result is a deeply interdisciplinary research, informed by the emancipatory impulse of critical theories (the Frankfurt School, but also contemporary theories from the global South) and by the interdisciplinary methodology in which she was trained at ASCA. From that starting point, she embarks on a critique of the ideology of the neoliberal present, understood as a global culture, with four lines of research: 1) Critical theories of the global South, 2) Dialectics of the Body, 3) Commodification of contemporary thought, and 4) Polymarental Families, Biopower and Late Capitalism.

Her publications include two authored books, "Unrealized Promises: The Subject of Postcolonial Discourse and the New International Division of Labor" (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2015) and "Shylock and African Socialism: the Postcolonial Shakespeare of Julius Nyerere" (Mexico City and Bogotá: UAM and Universidad del Rosario, 2019), two edited volumes (including "Marx, Semiotics and Political Praxis," special issue of "Open Cultural Studies") and more than twenty articles and book chapters in indexed journals and recognized academic publishers, such as "Periphery" (in "Future Theory: A Bloomsbury Handbook to Critical Concepts," London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), "The Dialectics of Illusion: Around Background Story 7" (in "Critical Essays on Xu Bing's Background Story Series and his Oeuvre," Beijing: Life Bookstore, 2016) and "Leverage: The Art of the Mexican Student Movement" (in "Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies," vol. 22, no. 4: 2013).