Sophia Monegro

Sophia Monegro is a literary scholar whose work and teaching interests sit at the crossroads of Black women’s intellectual history, Caribbean studies, and digital humanities. She earned her Ph.D. in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at The University of Texas at Austin in 2025. Monegro’s forthcoming book, Architects of Relation: Black Women’s Social Thought from Santo Domingo to the Atlantic World, traces African and African descendant women’s methods for navigating colonialism, slavery, and misogynoir in the first European colony of the Americas, showing how their practices constituted proto-Black feminism. The Fulbright Program in the Dominican Republic, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Association of University Women have supported Monegro’s scholarly research. Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies and the Global Black Thought Journal have published Monegro’s award-winning scholarship.

As a digital humanist, Monegro’s digital projects democratize access to archives that account for Black Caribbean women’s intellectualism in the Atlantic world. Her digital projects have been funded by the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective at Yale University and the Black Communication and Technology Lab at the University of Maryland, College Park, and have been published on JSTOR. Monegro is currently serving as the primary investigator on an ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant for the creation of “Cimarronas: A Black Women’s Archive of Ayiti-Quisqueya,” a trilingual digital platform that makes Black women’s histories in the Caribbean accessible to diverse audiences through interactive animations, place-based documentaries, and archival documents. Her digital projects, archival preservation work, and revisionist public history activism are grounded in the community-based and material needs of Black Dominicans and African American descendants in the Dominican Republic and its diaspora. She comes to Smith after having served most recently as the inaugural postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity at Washington University in St. Louis.

“The Origins of Black Women’s Thought in the Americas: La Negra del Hospital in Colonial Santo Domingo.” Global Black Thought Journal 1.2. The University of Pennsylvania Press. Fall 2025: 289–321.

“Black Women Enterprising Freedom in Colonial Santo Domingo.” Black Perspectives. 2024.

“Dominican Americans.” Co-authored with Ramona Hernández, Ph.D. Ilan Stavans (Ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies. 2021.