Daylet Domínguez

Daylet Domínguez

WILBUR MARVIN VISITING SCHOLAR
headshot of Daylet Dominguez

Daylet Domínguez (PhD Princeton University) is an Associate Professor at the Spanish and Portuguese Department of UC Berkeley. She is a scholar of modern Caribbean, and her work focuses on travel cultures and costumbrismo; empire, nation and revolution; slavery, race and colonialism, among other topics. Her book, Ficciones etnográficas: literatura, ciencias sociales y proyectos nacionales en el Caribe hispano del siglo XIX (Iberoamericana 2021), studies the interplay of literature and science in nineteenthcentury Hispanic Caribbean. It particularly emphasizes the importance of literature (travel writing, costumbrista sketches and the realist novel) for the establishment of the social sciences in the region.

Domínguez 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). 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. 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.

Her articles have been published in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Hispanic Review, Cuban Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Iberoamericana, among others.

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