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. Her research explores how Black communities in Caribbean Central America have confronted racialized and gendered colonial violence and forged pathways of sovereignty and belonging across shifting colonial and national landscapes. Her first book manuscript, tentatively titled Sovereign Mosquitia: Intimate Violence and Anticolonial Refusal on the Miskitu Coast, 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 and Afro-Latinx art; the histories, politics, and visual cultures of Caribbean Central America; and familial and personal narratives as frameworks for anticolonial criticism.

Her newest research turns to Miami, a key city in the hemispheric Americas and a vital, though often negated and contested, site of Blackness. This emerging project explores how Black (including Afro-Latinx and Afro-Caribbean) artists, intellectuals, and communities have shaped the city's cultural identity. In doing so, it reveals Miami's deep entanglements with hemispheric structures of white supremacy and anti-Blackness, and positions the city as a critical nexus where these forces are confronted through Black critical thought and creative practice.

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 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.