ABOUT ME

Thank you for visiting my website! I am a historian of the Spanish Atlantic, whose work aims to reconstruct the ways in which the Hispanic world contributed to the development of early modern globalization, capitalism, and statecraft. In this website you will find information about my research, publications, and teaching interests. Please feel free to send me a note if you have any questions.

Born and raised in the Dominican Republic, I arrived in Brooklyn, NY as a sixteen-year-old high school student. In part because of my inadequate academic preparation and my weak English language skills, I initially struggled in college. After a few unsuccessful attempts to earn a B.A. degree, I dropped out and spent many years in New York playing Afro-Caribbean music from the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Given my obsession with Afro-Caribbean music, it was not exactly obvious to me that I would eventually become a scholar. However, I was lucky to encounter many outstanding teachers who inspired and empowered me along the way. I would like nothing more than to do the same for my students.

While my story is anomalous, to say the least, I often use my unique set of experiences in productive ways. In particular, I harness my background as an immigrant and former musician to develop compelling scholarship, effective teaching, and empowering mentoring. As an educator, I focus on teaching students how to ask important questions and how to build persuasive arguments. As a mentor, I push students to empower themselves by becoming compelling thinkers. As a researcher, I use my position as an academic “outsider” to ask new questions and address old questions in innovative ways. Thus, I remain thoroughly convinced that my alterity in relation to the academy is not a weakness but rather a major strength. 

I currently hold a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, for which I am based in the Freie Universität Berlin. As a Humboldt research fellow, I am working to complete my first book and will begin to develop my second book project. From 2016 to 2018, I held a Provost's Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Chicago, where I conducted research, wrote journal articles, and taught two courses. Before then, I earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University (2016), a B.A. from The City College of New York (2011), and an A.A. from LaGuardia Community College (2008).

My current book project in progress is titled The Imperial Machine: Assembling the Spanish Commercial Empire in the Age of Enlightenment. It traces how an ambitious group of Spanish statesmen re-imagined Spain's vast territories as a well-ordered machine and devised a comprehensive plan to erect an integrated commercial empire centered on stimulating broad-based economic growth. Ultimately, The Imperial Machine brings to light the Hispanic world’s novel project of economic modernization during the age of Enlightenment.

My second book project is tentatively titled Empirical Statecraft: The Emergence of an Information Empire in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Atlantic. It will reconstruct the emergence of a distinctly modern logic of government centered on harnessing scientific, economic, and administrative information to design imperial policy. In doing so, Empirical Statecraft will demonstrate that the Spanish Atlantic became a vast laboratory of the modern information age, a development that brought to the fore both the promise of knowledge-based governance and the perils of misinformation and distortion.

For an interview about my research, please click here.

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