Bio

Dr. Melanie Y. White is an Assistant Professor of Afro-Caribbean Studies in the Department of Black Studies and the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. For the spring 2026 semester, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor and Black Miami Studies Fellow at the Center for Global Black Studies and in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Miami. Her research explores how Black communities in Caribbean Central America have confronted intimate colonial violence and forged pathways of gendered sovereignty and belonging across shifting colonial and national landscapes. Her first book manuscript, tentatively titled Sovereign Mosquitia: Black and Afro-Indigenous Women’s Anticolonial Refusal, traces Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous women's anti-colonial performance, visual culture, and political organizing on the Miskitu Coast from the colonial period to the present. The book reveals how intimate colonial violence has deeply shaped the imperial borderlands of the far western/Central American Caribbean, as well as how Mosquitian women have crafted a vision for the region rooted in intimate, rather than settler, sovereignty. More broadly, her research and teaching interests include hemispheric Black feminisms; Afro-Caribbean, Central American, and Latinx art and literature; digital humanities and archival practices; and familial and personal narratives as frameworks for anticolonial criticism.

She is currently at work on two new projects. The first is a book that theorizes Miami as a hemispheric Black city where the histories and afterlives of racial formation across the Americas are brought into contact under conditions of spatial constraint and racial hierarchy. Through readings of visual art, literature, and cultural and intellectual production, the project examines how African American, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latinx, and Black Central American communities have produced Miami as a space of Black life and thought. Her second project examines Afro-Caribbean Central American women’s art and the politics of autonomy in the far western Caribbean. Focusing on island communities such as San Andrés, the Corn Islands, and Roatán, it shows how artists document and contest histories of displacement, state assimilation, and tourism-driven dispossession. The project also highlights how their work sustains cultural memory, connection, and autonomy across archipelagic worlds that nation-states have sought to fragment.

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