Dr. Ileana Rodriguez Silva

Biography

Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva is an Associate Professor and the Roseman Endowed Professor in the Department of History at the University of Washington. She specializes in Latin American and Caribbean history. Rodríguez-Silva earned her B.A. in History from the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Río Piedras, graduating magna cum laude, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her doctoral dissertation was completed in 2004. Her research interests encompass race-making in the Americas, racial identity formation, post-emancipation racial politics, and comparative colonial arrangements within empires. Rodríguez-Silva's published work includes the book 'Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonial Regimes, National Struggles Post-Emancipation Puerto Rico, 1850-1920' (Palgrave, 2012), which received the 2012-2014 Frank Bonilla Book Award for Puerto Rican Studies. She has also contributed to various academic publications on topics such as freedwomen in Puerto Rico during the emancipation period and has co-edited a special issue of 'Positions: Asia Critique'. Currently, she is involved in several projects examining citizenship, the middle class in early twentieth-century Puerto Rico, and the implications of Puerto Rico's Commonwealth status. Rodríguez-Silva teaches courses on the historical topics of race, gender, and colonialism, emphasizing the role of social and cultural histories in understanding Latin America and the Caribbean from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Research Interests