[VIRTUAL] Talking About Race Matters 2025: “Archival Justice: Black Dominican Studies Archive-Building across Samaná, Puerto Plata, and Ayiti” with Dr. Sophia Monegro

Date: October 8, 2025

Time: 6pm-7pm

Cost: FREE!

Registration Required? YES! Register here!

Location: Virtual via Zoom

Twice a year, Dyckman Farmhouse Museum hosts Talking About Race Matters (TARM), a FREE three-part virtual lecture series where notable community leaders and esteemed scholars share their groundbreaking research on cultural history, racial identity, and social justice. Each TARM series is grounded in a unifying theme. For this Hispanic Heritage Month, all three TARM lectures will explore the history and formation of Afro-Caribbean identity.

Join us for the third and FINAL session of Talking About Race Matters 2025 featuring Dr. Sophia Monegro, a literary scholar working at the intersection of Black Women’s Intellectual History, Dominican Studies, and Digital Humanities. She will be presenting “Archival Justice: Black Dominican Studies Archive-Building across Samaná, Puerto Plata, and Ayiti.”

This presentation introduces restorative justice and community-engaged approaches to building Black archives. You will learn about: the “We Choose Freedom: Samaná, Dominican Republic,” a digital collection documenting the papers of African American descendant Samaneses; the “Guerilla Archiving Program” currently based in Puerto Plata; and the forthcoming digital archive “Cimarronas: A Black Woman’s Archive of Ayiti/Quisqueya” a trilingual platform aimed at making Black women’s histories, as they traveled across the Atlantic, Caribbean, and South America from the 16th to 19th centuries, accessible to diverse audiences using interactive animations, digital mapping tools, primary documents, multimedia essays, and site-based micro documentaries.

Dr. Sophia Monegro earned a PhD in African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Currently, Dr. Monegro is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity at Washington University in St. Louis. Monegro’s research agenda democratizes access to archives that help account for Black intellectual production in the Atlantic world.

Dyckman Farmhouse Museum’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Talking about Race Matters is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.