Dra. Ramona Hernández is director of the Dominican Studies Institute of The City University of New York (CUNY) housed at The City College of New York, and is Professor of Sociology at The City College and on the faculty of The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Renowned sociologist and public intellectual in the United States, Dr. Hernández is author of pioneering texts in the areas of migration, labor, and Dominican studies, including The Dominican Americans (184 pages), co-authored with Silvio Torres-Saillant, and published by Greenwood Press in 1998; The Mobility of Workers Under Advanced Capitalism: Dominican Migration to the United States (227 pages), published by Columbia University Press in 2002 and awarded “Outstanding Academic Title” by Choice in 2003; “Dominican Immigrants” in Multicultural America: An Encyclopedia of the Newest Americans (70 pages), co-authored with Anthony Stevens-Acevedo and published by Greenwood Press in 2011; and La República Dominicana y la prensa extranjera: mayo 1961-septiembre 1963 (Desde la desaparición de Trujillo hasta Juan Bosch) (459 pages), co-authored with Sully Saneaux and published by Biblioteca Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña in 2013.
Under her leadership the CUNY DSI has greatly expanded its Dominican Library and has launched its Dominican Archives, which holds possibly the only collection of Dominican colonial documents in the U.S. with approximately 110,000 pages of manuscripts from 16th century La Española (today’s Dominican Republic). In 2011-2013 Dr. Hernández led an NEH-funded research project that produced the Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning Tool, the only interactive online platform in the world devoted to teaching the deciphering and reading of the handwriting styles of manuscripts from the early-modern Spanish-language world. To visit the Tool, go to www.spanishpaleographytool.org To read the White Paper about the Tool’s functioning and its reception by the scholarly community, go to:https://securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/main.aspx?f=1&gn=HD-51459-11 and click on «[View white paper].» Another interactive online project currently under her direction, First Blacks in the Americas, will feature new archival manuscripts, maps and photographs to tell the story of the first generations of Black Africans and their descendants to inhabit the Americas (in La Española) after Columbus.
Dr. Hernández is a trustee of the Sociological Initiatives Foundation and her work is celebrated also in the Dominican Republic where she has received the country’s highest civilian honor, the Meritorious Order of Duarte, Sánchez y Mella, and serves as a trustee of the International Institute of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (Instituto Global de Altos Estudios en Ciencias Sociales).
Dr. Hernández earned a Ph.D. and an M.Phil. in Sociology from The Graduate Center, CUNY; an M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from New York University; and a B.A. in Latin American History from Lehman College.
CUNY Dominican Studies Institute
Founded in 1992 and housed at The City College of New York, the Dominican Studies Institute of the City University of New York (CUNY DSI) is the nation’s first university-based research institute devoted to the study of people of Dominican descent in the United States and other parts of the world. CUNY DSI’s mission is to produce and disseminate research and scholarship about Dominicans, and about the Dominican Republic. CUNY DSI is the locus for a community of scholars, including doctoral fellows, in the field of Dominican Studies and sponsors multidisciplinary research projects.
The Institute houses the Dominican Archives and the Dominican Library, the first and only institutions in the United States collecting primary and secondary source material about people of Dominican descent. In 2010, the Institute opened its Archives and Library facility to art exhibitions, thus becoming the first exhibit space in New York City devoted exclusively to work by and about people of Dominican descent. The Institute organizes lectures, conferences, and exhibitions that are open to the public.
The Institute is headed by renowned sociologist and public intellectual Ramona Hernández, Ph.D., author of pioneering texts in the areas of migration, labor, and Dominican studies. She is a trustee of the Sociological Initiatives Foundation.
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