Research Expertise and Interest

Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures

Research Description

Daylet Domínguez (Ph.D., Princeton University) is an Associate Professor of Caribbean and Latin American literatures and cultures. Her work focuses on modern travel cultures and costumbrismo; empire, nation and revolution; slavery, race and colonialism, among other topics. Her first book, Ficciones etnográficas: Literatura, ciencias sociales y proyectos nacionales en el Caribe hispano del siglo XIX ( Iberoamericana-Vervuert 2021), studies the interplay of literature and science in the nineteenth-century Hispanic Caribbean. It emphasizes the importance of literature for the establishment of the social sciences in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. She is also the co-editor of a special issue entitled Slavery, Mobility and Networks in nineteenth-century Cuba in the journal of Atlantic Studies (2021). Her articles have been published in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Hispanic Review, Cuban Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Iberoamericana, Atlantic Studies, among others

She is currently working on her second monograph, Caribbean Empire: Writing, Filibustering and Annexation in the Age of the Second Slavery, which focuses on the ways in which Cuban and southern U.S slaveholders turned to each other and imagined themselves as part of the same front, united by chattel bondage, in the decades preceding the U.S. Civil War. In particular, it studies how writers, travelers, and planters from both regions began to envision these new geopolitical cartographies through diplomacy, written press, and filibustering. Their commitment to the future of slavery enabled them to transcend colonial and national circuits and challenge existing geopolitical borders.

Domínguez was the 2022-23 Wilbur Marvin Scholar of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University for her current book project.