2023-24 New Faculty

I was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, but I was raised in the heart of Harlem, NYC. I received a B.A. and M.A. from the City College of New York (CUNY) in history, and I am now in the final stages of completing my Ph.D. in History at Brown University. Broadly conceived, my research interests include how Afro-Latin Americans have envisioned, articulated, and mobilized around ideas of freedom and liberation during the twentieth century. My manuscript explores this theme through the Caribbean context of university student movements in the Dominican Republic during the Cold War. Through oral histories, state archives, photographs, and personal archives, I show how students’ demands for freedom and liberation hinged on the push and pull of transnational and domestic forces. These included, but were not limited to, U.S. imperialism, domestic authoritarianism, and racial and national identity questions that emerged during the heady years of the 1960s and 70s. I am the creator of Opening the Archives-Dominican Republic project (OTA), a digital archive that makes documents about U.S.-Dominican relations during the Cold War publicly accessible. In my free time, I am a Martial Arts practitioner and aficionado, and I am always looking to learn new forms of Martial Arts combat.