Dixa Ramírez is Assistant Professor of transnational African American literatures in the American Studies and English departments. Her first book, Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present, argues that dominant Western discourses have ghosted Santo Domingo/the Dominican Republic despite its central place in the architecture of the Americas. She received her B.A. at Brown in Comparative Literature (focus on Japanese and Latin American literatures) and her Ph.D. at UC San Diego in Literature (focus on Hispanophone and Francophone Caribbean literatures). She comes back to Brown after a few years on the faculty at Yale University. A Mellon Mays Fellow, her work has been funded by several institutions, including the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the SSRC, and Princeton University’s Center for African American Studies.
Though her research focuses mostly on nineteenth- to twenty-first-century cultural texts (e.g, novels, films, architecture, photography, and performative acts), her undergraduate and graduate syllabi often span from 1492 to the present. Her favorite courses to teach include “Blackness in Latinx and Latin America,” “Zombies, Pirates, Ghosts, and Witches,” “Haiti in the trans-American Imaginary,” and “The African Diaspora Two Ways.”
Ramírez’s work has been published in Atlantic Studies, The Black Scholar, Comparative Literature, Small Axe,Avidly, and in the Dominican media. She is currently at work on her second book, In The Hills: Geographic Isolation and White Supremacy in Dominican and U.S. Nationalist Imaginaries, whichconsiders the question of racial legibility, visibility, and surveillance at the turn of the twentieth century.
