Silvio Torres-Saillant

Having founded the Dominican Studies Institute at the City University of New York (CUNY) and served on the New York Council for the Humanities, he currently forms part of two projects that aim to decolonize the academy by challenging the hierarchical and ethnocentric nature of knowledge production and dissemination in US institutions of higher education. He has written widely on Caribbean literature and thought, Latino discourse, Dominican society, intellectual history, Blackness in the Americas, and the role of learned elites in preserving the cultural logics brought into the world by the colonial transaction. His publications include An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (Palgrave 2006); The Dominican-Americans (Greenwood Press 1998); Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature (Cambridge UP 1997; Peepal Tree Press 2013); El Tigueraje Intelectual (2d ed. Mediabyte 2011); An Introduction to Dominican Blackness (CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, City College of New York, 1999); and El Retorno de las Yolas: Ensayos Sobre Diaspora, Democracia y Dominicanidad (Ediciones Libreria La Trinitaria 1999). Associate Editor of the journal Latino Studies and one of the Senior Editors of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, he has been Visiting Professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts, Wilbur Marvin Visiting Scholar in the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, and external faculty in the Social History of Education Doctoral Program at the University of Cartagena. His monograph The Advent of Blackness is forthcoming from the University Press of Florida, and the Ohio State University Press will publish his study of the poetry and poetics of Rhina P. Espaillat, co-authored with Nancy Kang.