Ileana Rodriguez-Silva (she/her/hers)

Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva is an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Washington-Seattle. She graduated magna cum laude from the Universidad de Puerto Rico - Río Piedras with a B.A. in History. She holds an M.A. in Latin American Studies and another in Latin American History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where Rodríguez also completed a History Ph.D. in 2004. Rodríguez-Silva's research focuses on race-making in the Americas, racial identity formation, post-emancipation racial politics, and comparative colonial arrangements in the configuration of empires.

Her book Silencing Blackness: Disentangling Race, Colonial Regimes, and National Struggles in Post-Emancipation Puerto Rico, 1850-1920 (Palgrave, 2012) received the 2012-2014 Frank Bonilla Book Award for Best Book on Puerto Rican Studies. She is also the author of "Exploring the Lives of Freedwomen: Choices, Family, and Gender during the Processes of Emancipation in Puerto Rico, 1873-1876" in Gender and Slave Emancipation in Comparative Perspective, Diana Paton and Pamela Scully, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). Rodríguez-Silva is coeditor with Laurie Sears of the special issue The Politics of Storytelling in Island Imperial Formations, positions: asia critique, Vol. 21, Issue 1, 2021. She has published articles in the Hispanic American Historical Review, NACLA, and Modern American History. Rodríguez is currently working on two projects: Cimarrón Citizenship: Reconstituting the Black Middle Class of Early Twentieth Century Puerto Rico and Re-Articulating the US Imperial Field: Puerto Rico’s Commonwealth and the Browning of the Middle-Class in the Early Cold War Decades.