John William Archbold

//PhD candidate in Modern Languages, University of Alcalá de Henares, Bachelor's degree in Social Sciences and Master's degree in Hispanic American and Caribbean Literature

//Lecturer and researcher

//January 2026

Photo: Henry Navarro

John William Archbold (1990). Afro-Caribbean. Born in Barranquilla with roots in southern La Guajira and the island of Providencia. He currently resides in a highland region that, to his own surprise, has become his home. He is a lecturer and researcher for the Master's degree in Literature and Culture at the Caro y Cuervo Institute. From his line of Afro and indigenous literature, he also serves as coordinator of the Chair of Afro Heritage. He has a degree in social sciences and a master's degree in Hispanic American and Caribbean literature from the University of Atlántico, and is currently a doctoral student in modern languages, researching literature and culture at the University of Alcalá de Henares. He is also a writer and cultural journalist. His articles and chronicles have been published in Semana, Arcadia, Avianca, Actual, Welcome magazines and El Heraldo and El Isleño newspapers. His first novel, Comehierro, won the Germán Vargas Cantillo Novel Prize and was published by Clu Editores in 2024. A compilation of his short stories, which have already been included in various anthologies, is currently being edited.

His research interests include the dialogue between African literary traditions and Afro-diasporic literature, especially in the Caribbean context. He has also explored the recreation of African-based spiritualities in Latin American literature and the interactions between masculinities and colonialism in processes of hegemony.

Candelario Obeso Scholarship for research on African and Afro-diasporic thought in the Colombian Caribbean

This scholarship is a collaboration between the Kitambo Foundation and El Boga foundation. In Mompox, John William will continue his research on the representation of Afro literature and oral traditions in museums, exploring boga as a literary motif, which he sees as a unifying figure in Afro-Colombian literature. He seeks to conduct archival research, as well as a series of focus groups with the community of Mompox, to establish some notions about the narratives surrounding the popular imagination of boga, in contrast to those contained in the works of Juan José Nieto, Candelario Obeso, Jorge Artel, and Helcías Martán Góngora as founding figures of Afro-Colombian literature, in which the boga remains a recurring motif and constitutes a definitive link between their discourses. In this way, it also aims to broaden perspectives on the historiography of Colombian literature, in which the categorisation of subalternised literary traditions remains a subject of debate.

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This scholarship is a collaboration between El Boga foundation and the Kitambo Foundation.