Sophia Monegro is a literary scholar working at the intersection of Black Women’s Intellectual History, Dominican Studies, and Digital Humanities. She is a doctoral candidate in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin and soon to be a Postdoctoral Associate with the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Equity at Washington University. Her dissertation, Shadow Scholars: Black Women’s Thought in Santo Domingo, 1492-1900, traces African and African descendant women’s work and intellectualism on the Indigenous island of Ayiti, today’s Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. This multimodal dissertation repositions entrepreneurial healers, savvy market women, plantation managers, and working-class organizers as organic intellectuals to argue that the principles embedded in Black women’s daily practices in colonial Santo Domingo constitute the intellectual pillars of Black Feminism in the Americas. The Fulbright Program in the Dominican Republic, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Association of University Women have supported Monegro’s scholarly research. Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies and the Global Black Thought Journal have published Monegro’s scholarship. Monegro’s Digital Humanities research agenda democratizes access to archival materials that help us account for Black intellectual production in the Atlantic world. Her digital projects have been funded by the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective at Yale University and the Black Communication and Technology Lab at the University of Maryland College Park and published on JStor. Monegro is currently serving as the Primary Investigator on an ACLS Digital Seed Grant for the creation of Cimarronas: A Black Women’s Archive of Ayiti-Quisqueya, a trilingual digital platform aimed at making Black Women’s histories in the Caribbean accessible to diverse audiences using interactive animations. Her digital projects, archival preservation work, and revisionist public history activism are grounded in the community-based and material needs of Black Dominicans and African American descendants in the Dominican Republic and its diaspora.
