New faculty: Anasa Hicks

We are delighted to welcome Anasa Hicks as our new Caribbean specialist. Hicks will receive her Ph.D. this summer from New York University. Her research focuses on Cuba with a Caribbean wide analytic lens. Based on extensive and original archival work in Havana and Santiago, Cuba, her dissertation (entitled "Hierarchies at Home") interrogates the ways that employers perceived domestic workers from the abolition of slavery in the late 1880s to the time before the 1959 Revolution. The work bridges a critical period in Cuban history and it complicates the historical understanding of the roles of home workers within systems of patriarchy and race. Her work has already received significant recognition, she was a 2014-2015 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow. Hicks has also received prestigious awards from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation as well as support to undertake research at the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami. Prior to her graduate work at NYU, she earned her BA with Honors from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2011. In the fall semester of 2017, Professor Hicks will teach History of the Caribbean (LAH 4470) and Social Revolutionary Movements in Latin America (LAH 4748).