Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo is Assistant Professor in the American Studies and English departments. Her research and teaching focus on the literature, history, and lifeworlds of the extended Caribbean, focusing especially on the Dominican Republic and Haiti. She received her A.B. from Brown University in Comparative Literature and her PhD from the University of California, San Diego.
Her first book, Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present (NYU Press, 2019) argues that dominant Western discourses have ghosted the Dominican Republic despite its central place in the architecture of the Americas. It received the 2019 Barbara Christian Literary Award from the Caribbean Studies Association and the 2019 Isis Duarte Book Prize from the Haiti/Dominican Republic section at the Latin American Studies Association.
She is in the midst of manifesting her second book, Blackness in the Hills and the Photographic Negative, which is under contract with Duke University Press. Blackness in the Hills and the Photographic Negative muses on how black people, especially black Caribbean people, have created aesthetic modes of livingness beyond the dictates of Western (i.e., white European) epistemes. Untroubled by essentialism or property ownership, what she calls "the hills" are a portal through which black people stake a claim to land that is not based on Western ideas of property and ownership—a “holding” rather than a “having,” to cite Sarah Cervenak’s and J. Kameron Carter’s writing on the black outdoors.
Ramírez D’Oleo’s work appears or will appear in Atlantic Studies, The Black Scholar, Comparative Literature, Small Axe, Avidly, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, Social Text, ASAP/Journal, and in the Dominican media. She is also on the Editorial Committee of Small Axe and is Second Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.
