Solsiree Del Moral, Assistant Professor of History
301 Weaver
814-863-0086
sxd46@psu.edu
Fields
I am a social and cultural historian of Latin America and the Caribbean with an interest in the historical construction of race. The Caribbean, Brazil, and Latin America offers historians the opportunity to examine the interconnections of race, gender, and class with issues of nation, citizenship, and colonialism. My research has focused on race, colonial education, teachers, and US colonialism in Puerto Rico during the early twentieth century. I examine how despite the U.S. colonial education policy of Americanization, early twentieth-century Puerto Rican teachers constructed and practiced an alternative nationalist project for the “racial” regeneration of the Puerto Rican citizenry through the island’s colonial public school system. In demarcating teachers’ simultaneous creation of an alternative nationalist schooling project, and their use of colonial ideas of race and progress, my research uncovers both the contradictions and the ironies of culture, politics, and education in the early twentieth century. I will offer undergraduate and graduate courses that cover the following themes within the history of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latinos/as in the U.S.: race & nation; gender & sexuality; US empire; comparative slavery, abolition, and post-emancipation societies; and the Caribbean experience within the U.S.
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