Isaias Rojas-Perez

About Fellow

Isaias Rojas-Pérez is associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers University–Newark. He is the author of the award-winning book Mourning Remains: State Atrocity, Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared in Peru’s Postwar Andes (Stanford University Press, 2017). His research and teaching focus on sovereignty, violence, rights, transitional justice, necropolitics, time and memory and the ritualization of death in Andean Peru.

His current book project, After “Never Again”: The Dead, Forensic Exhumations, and Percolations of Justice in Postwar Andean Peru, documents the more than four-decade struggle for justice waged by survivors of the 1985 Accomarca massacre in Peru’s rural Andes. The book begins in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, when Quechua-speaking survivors started walking the corridors of Spanish-speaking state institutions to challenge military impunity, and ends four decades later with the collective reburial of the victims and the conversion of the former military base in the village into both a pantheon and a memorial museum, in a context in which Peru’s post-“Never Again” elites renew efforts to grant immunity to perpetrators of mass violence against Andean communities in the name of development and national security.

Selected Publications

• Rojas-Pérez, Isaias. “(Hand)Writing the Aftermath: Fieldnotes for an Anthropology of Disappearance in Post-conflict Peru.” History & Memory 38, no. 2 (2026): 7–39.
• Rojas-Pérez, Isaias. “History under the Weather: Political Transitions, Regimes of Animation, and the Dead in Postwar Andean Peru.” In The Cambridge Handbook of the Anthropology of Death, edited by Ruth Poulson, Sarah Richardson, and Sarah Wagner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026.
• Rojas-Pérez, Isaias. “Sovereignty in Ruins: Necropower, Necro-governmentality, and the Figure of the People in Peru’s Postwar Andes.” In Echoes of Catastrophe: Political Violence and Everyday Life in Latin America, edited by Chie Ishida. Tokyo: Shumpu-sha Publishing, 2026.
• Rojas-Pérez, Isaias. Mourning Remains: State Atrocity, Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared in Peru’s Postwar Andes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017.
• Rojas-Pérez, Isaias. “Unearthing Ongoing Pasts: Forensic Anthropology, State Making and Justice Making in Postwar Peru.” In Disturbing Bodies: Anthropology and the Remains of the Dead, edited by Zoe Crossland and Rosemary Joyce. Santa Fe, NM: School of Advanced Research Press, 2015.