Sophie Maríñez
Sophie Maríñez is Assistant Professor of French and Spanish at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. She holds a Ph.D. in French from The Graduate Center, CUNY (2010), and an M.A. in Liberal Studies with a focus on Dominican-American Identity and Literature from Empire State College, SUNY (2003). Her research interests include early modern French literature; French Caribbean studies; Haitian-Dominican relations; and Haitian and Dominican Diasporas in the U.S. Her current project focuses on the French Caribbean and the dynamics between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Her first book, Mademoiselle de Montpensier: Writings, Châteaux, and Female Self-Construction in Early Modern France (Leiden: Brill, 2017), is an NEH-funded monograph on women who used their writings, and chateaux to convey their social and political identities. Prior to being in academia, she worked as a translator, a journalist and, a cultural attaché at the Embassy of the Dominican Republic in Mexico.
Collected Work
Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic
Spirals in the Caribbean responds to key questions elicited by the human rights crisis accelerated in 2013 by the Dominican Constitutional Court’s Ruling 168-13, which denationalized hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Through the framework of the Spiral, a concept at the core of a Haitian literary aesthetic developed in the 1960s called Spiralism, Sophie Maríñez explores in this book representations of colonial, imperial, and national-era violence. She takes as evidence legislation, private and official letters, oral traditions, collective memories, Afro-indigenous spiritual and musical practices, and works of fiction, plays, and poetry produced across the island and its diasporas from 1791 to 2002.