DEPARTMENT OF BLACK STUDIES

Research Interests:

Early 16th-century afro-indigenous anti-colonial resistance in Ayiti-Kiskeya-Bohio, the relationship between historical erasure and identity formation, Black feminist hauntology, maroonage, critical theories of the state/violence, pedagogy of slavery, BlackCrit, Third World feminism, metaphysics of Blackness, and fugitivity.

Biography:

Charina Natalia Herrera is a first year student in the Department of African American Studies PhD program. She graduated from Rhode Island College with a BA in Africana Studies. Her senior thesis, “Negra detrás de la oreja, y en la cara también,” examined the intersections of public memory and racial identity formation in the Dominican Republic in order to elucidate the forgetting and remembering of slavery, specifically through public school social science textbooks. At the root of her work, she aims to complicate geo-political-spatial influences on blackness and haunting.