Sebastián López Vergara focuses on Latin American Cultural Studies and Indigenous Studies. He is interested in studying Indigenous politics in Latin America and the permanence and changes of colonialism.

While his research addresses indigeneity, colonial dispossession, racialization, and patriarchy for the production and reproduction of capitalism in modern Chile, he studies these formations in relation to the differentiation of Indigenous and other racialized populations during homogenizing processes of capitalist accumulation and nation-state formation across the Americas and the Pacific.

He is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media. He participated in the 2017 Summer Institute on Global Indigeneities, received the 2017 WISIR Research Grant, and was part of the 2018 EWP’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Collaboration Grant. He published with Tony Lucero an essay review on Mapuche scholarship on Latin American Research Review. He also participates in the Simpson Center graduate research cluster for Indigenous Studies. He has taught film, media, and English composition classes, Spanish language, and regularly volunteers with University Beyond Bars.