Dr. Ramona Hernandez

Director, CUNY Dominican Studies Institute
Professor of Sociology, The City College of New York Doctoral
Faculty in Sociology, The Graduate Center, CUNY
212.650.7496
rhernandez@ccny.cuny.edu

 

 

 

Ramona Hernandez is the Director of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute (CUNY DSI) and a Professor of Sociology, both at the City College of New York. She is also on the faculty at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research interests include the mobility of workers from Latin America and the Caribbean, the socioeconomic conditions of Dominicans in the U.S., and the restructuring of the world economy and its effects on working-class people.

Under her leadership, CUNY DSI, which is home to a research unit, Dominican Library, and Dominican Archives, has distinguished itself as a world-class institute of research known for its groundbreaking scholarship on the history of the Dominican people in the United States and elsewhere. Among CUNY DSI's most recent contributions are the discovery of the Dominican Juan Rodriguez, the first immigrant to have settled in New York City in 1613, and Esteban Hotesse, the only Dominican-born member of the Tuskegee Airmen. Hotesse is one of over 300 World War II Dominican veterans whose stories have been collected and documented by CUNY DSI in the ongoing Fighting for Democracy: Dominican Veterans from World War II project, which launched in 2015.The Institute is also the creator of the Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning Tool, the only interactive online platform in the world devoted to teaching the deciphering and reading of the handwriting styles of manuscripts from the early-modern Spanish-language world. In 2020, CUNY DSI again made waves in the world of public humanities with the release of the National Institute for the Humanities-funded project, A History of Dominican Music in the United States, the first open-source digital tool narrating the history of Dominican music as it developed during the past century in the U.S. In 2021, in continuation of years of research on the First Blacks in the Americas and in commemoration of the first rebellion of enslaved Black Africans in the Americas, which took place in La Española (today the Dominican Republic and the Republic of Haiti) in 1521, CUNY DSI undertook the first Archeological Survey in the Dominican Republic aimed at locating the site of the sugar mill where this transcendental event took place 500 years ago.