Bio

Dr. Melanie Y. White is an interdisciplinary Black Studies scholar and cultural historian of Caribbean Central America. She is currently an ACLS Fellow and Assistant Professor of Afro-Caribbean Studies in the Department of Black Studies and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. Her first book manuscript in-progress, tentatively titled Sovereign Mosquitia: Intimate Colonial Violence and Afro-Indigenous Women's Refusal, 17th Century-Present, traces Afro-Indigenous (Black, Indigenous, and Black Indigenous) women’s anti-colonial performance, visual culture, and political organizing on the Miskitu Coast from the 17th century to the present. Her research reveals how racialized, gendered, and intimate, settler colonial violence has deeply shaped the imperial borderlands of the far western Caribbean, as well as how Black, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous women have crafted and envisioned a path for the region rooted in intimate, rather than settler, sovereignty. More broadly, her research and teaching interests include hemispheric Black feminisms, Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latinx art, and the histories, politics, and visual cultures of the Central American Caribbean.

Dr. White earned her Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. Her work is published or forthcoming in Caribbean Quarterly, The Forum for Inter-American Research, Small Axe, NACLA Report on the Americas, and the edited volumes Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Critical Perspectives and Research and Black Feminisms Beyond Borders: Cultivating Knowledge, Solidarity, and Liberation. She is also the co-founder and co-coordinator of The Black Central Americas Project and an advisory board member of Recuerdos de Nicaragua.