Nara Roberta Silva is Core Faculty and Praxis Program Head at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and an Affiliate Fellow at Georgetown University’s Workers’ Rights Institute. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil, where she also earned her B.A. and M.A. Her research and teaching focus on social and political theory, racial capitalism, social movements, political economy, and participatory democracy, with a sustained commitment to public scholarship and social justice.

Her writing has appeared in venues including Jacobin, The Baffler, openDemocracy, and academic journals. Her first book, Contradições da Horizontalidade, offers Portuguese-speaking audiences a distinctive perspective on Occupy Wall Street, challenging romanticized accounts of the movement while honoring its radical democratic experimentation. Building on her longstanding interest in participation and collective action, her current book project examines Black movements in Brazil and the U.S. in the late 20th century, examining how their visions of racial identity, national history, democracy, and social transformation responded to and shaped distinct political contexts.