Daylet Domínguez (PhD Princeton University) is an Associate Professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department of UC Berkeley. She is a scholar of Caribbean and Latin American literature and culture, with special emphasis on travel cultures and costumbrismo; empire, nation and revolution; slavery, race and colonialism, among other topics. Her book, Ficciones etnográficas: literatura, ciencias sociales y proyectos nacionales en el Caribe hispano del siglo XIX (Iberoamericana 2021), studies the interplay of literature and science in nineteenth century Hispanic Caribbean. It particularly emphasizes the importance of literature for the establishment of the social sciences in the region.
Domínguez is also the co-editor of a special issue entitled Slavery, Mobility and Networks in nineteenth-century Cuba in the journal of Atlantic Studies (2021). Her articles have been published in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Hispanic Review, Cuban Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Iberoamericana, among others.
She is currently working on her second monograph, Caribbean Empire: Writing, Filibustering and Annexation in the Age of the Second Slavery, which focuses on the ways in which Cuban and southern U.S slaveholders turned to each other and imagined themselves as part of the same front, united by chattel bondage, in the decades preceding the U.S. Civil War. This book project studies how writers, travelers, and planters from both regions began to envision these new geopolitical cartographies through diplomacy, written press, and filibustering. Their commitment to the future of slavery enabled them to transcend colonial and national circuits and challenge existing geopolitical borders. Domínguez was named the 2022-23 Wilbur Marvin Scholar of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University for her second book project.
