Skip to main content

Fernando Tormos Aponte

Fernando Tormos-Aponte is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, a Kendall Fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Cambridge. He earned his MA and Ph.D. in Political Science from Purdue University, West Lafayette, and a BA from the Universidad de Puerto Rico—Río Piedras. Dr. Tormos-Aponte specializes in environmental and racial justice, intersectional solidarity, identity politics, social policy, and transnational politics. Tormos-Aponte’s research is situated in two areas of inquiry. Inspired by the devastating toll that hurricanes Irma and María had on his native Puerto Rico, Tormos-Aponte investigates civil society claims about the uneven government response across communities. His work in this area examines the causes and consequences of government neglect of socially vulnerable communities during disaster recoveries. Tormos-Aponte’s work also investigates how marginalized groups organize to address their societal needs. He seeks to understand the drivers and consequences of building solidarity across social group differences and how social movements develop an intersectional organizing approach. Tormos-Aponte’s work has appeared in Social Politics, Energy Policy, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Social Science Quarterly, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Environmental Policy and Governance, Public Administration Review, Alternautas, PS: Political Science and Politics, and in the edited books Latinas and the Politics of Urban Spaces, Gendered Mobilizations, and The Legacy of Second-Wave Feminism in American Politics. He is currently working on projects on intersectional solidarity, the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental justice, transnational social movements, and activism in Puerto Rico. His public writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Scientific American, Union of Concerned Scientists Blog, Nueva Sociedad, Jacobin, In These Times, London School of Economics United States Politics and Policy Blog, Undisciplined Environments, and Latino Rebels.