Ph.D., Brown University, 2023, History
B.A./M.A., City College of New York, 2014 History
René Cordero is a professor in the Department of Latin American and Latinx Studies. He earned a PhD at Brown University and is now completed his book manuscript about the history of university politics in the Dominican Republic during the twentieth century. René’s research interest and teaching spans modern Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino/a/x history, with a more specific focus on race, politics, and state governance in the Caribbean and Latinx contexts.
History 342: At the Crossroads of Race and Nation: Borders and Frontiers in Latin America and the Caribbean
History 343: Student Movements, Youth Politics, and the University in Modern Latin America and the Caribbean
Essay: “Chronicle of a Massacre: The Archive’s Redemptive and Transformative Potential,” in Revista Estudio Sociales “Memoria del Autoritarismo” Año 54, Vol. XLIV. Núm. 165 Enero-Junio 2022, Pg. 207-211. http://estudiossociales.bono.edu.do/index.php/es/article/view/1045/1002
Blog: “The Latin American Archive: From State Repression to Political Redemption.” Washington D.C., Woodrow Wilson Cold War International History Project, May 11, 2020. URL: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/latin-american-archive-state-repression-political-redemption
Instructional: “Animal-Human Vocabulary Builder” by Dominick Acocella and René Cordero CUNY Academic Works Open Educational Resources https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cc_oers/372/
2023: Best Dissertation Prize of the History department at Brown University
2022: Global Mobility Research Fellowship
2022: Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, (Honorable Mentions List)
2021: Citizens and Scholars Dissertation Writing Fellowship
2021: Fulbright IIE Research Scholarship
2021: Humanities Without Walls
2020: Woodrow Wilson MMUF Summer Research and Travel Award
2020: Dominican Studies Institute Research Grant
René Cordero is a historian of modern Latin America and the Caribbean. His focus specializes in the question of how peoples across the hemisphere envisioned and articulated freedom and sovereignty. His current manuscript project tells the institutional history of the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo (UASD), which played a significant role in the Dominican Republic’s national politics during the twentieth century. Through oral histories, photographs, state documents, and university archives, René chronicles the rise of this peculiar public institution as it witnessed and participated in the seismic political, demographic, and cultural transformations of Dominican society. René is also the coordinator of Opening the Archives Dominican Republic (OTA), a digital archive housed at the Brown Library that makes thousands of declassified documents about Dominican and U.S. relations during the Cold War available for scholars, students, and the public.