On March 19, 2025, Pascha Bueno-Hansen, associate professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies and the Department of Political Science and International Relations, was named to a five-year appointment as the John and Patricia Cochran Scholar of Inclusive Excellence at the University of Delaware.

Bueno-Hansen grew up in an intergenerational family with her Peruvian mother, U.S.-born father of Danish descent and Peruvian grandparents.

As an activist-scholar, she is involved in transnational collaborative projects in solidarity with indigenous women’s and LGBTI resistance struggles in defense of human rights in the Américas. In the Delaware Bay region, she is committed to repairing relations with the Lenape and Nanticoke. She chairs the American Indian and Indigenous Relations committee of the University’s Anti-Racism Initiative and helped lead the Living Land Acknowledgement, Recommended Institutional Action Steps, UD Land Grant History, and the “Keywords for Building Relationships in Lenape and Nanticoke Homelands” projects.

Her award winning publications include Feminist and Human Rights Struggles in Peru: Decolonizing Transitional Justice (Spanish edition: Derechos Feministas y Humanos en el Perú: Decolonizando la Justicia Transicional). Her current book project, Dissident Genders and Sexualities in the Andes, examines the resistance practices of people of non-normative genders and sexualities to armed conflict, political repression and authoritarian regimes in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. She places her research and teaching at the service of social justice.

About the John and Patricia Cochran Scholar of Inclusive Excellence

The John and Patricia Cochran Scholars endowed fund was established in 2018 to recruit, develop, retain and promote a diverse faculty and support their successful academic career advancement. John Cochran is a former chair of UD’s Board of Trustees.

The Cochran Scholars program recognizes outstanding UD faculty members whose scholarship and service reflect excellence, creativity and a commitment to inclusiveness, both on campus and beyond. Those selected as Cochran Scholars are outstanding faculty members on an accelerated path for academic distinction. They focus on promoting and exemplifying diversity throughout the UD community, through their exceptional scholarship, teaching and service.​​