Juan José Ponce Vázquez, Ph.D.

Juan José Ponce Vázquez, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of History at The University of Alabama.  He is an expert in colonial Latin American history, the Spanish Caribbean, and the Spanish Atlantic. His first book, Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580-1690, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. Earlier this year, Islanders and Empire was awarded the Alfred B. Thomas Book Award, conferred by the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies. Currently, Prof. Ponce Vázquez is working on a book titled Between Bondage and Freedom: Enslaved and Free Afrodescendants in Colonial Hispaniola, 1590-1690 that will provide a detailed account of the ordinary lives of free and enslaved Afrodescendants in La Española during the seventeenth century. To construct these narratives, he will employ methodologies of family reconstitution and comparative historical analysis, placing La Española in conversation with other Spanish colonies of the time, specifically eastern Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. Prof. Ponce Vázquez participated in CUNY DSI’s international conference "The Struggle for Freedom in La Española: Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the First Slave Revolt in the Americas," an event organized in collaboration with the Black Studies Program at CCNY and Centro Cultural Eduardo Leon Jiménes alongside various prestigious institutions, on December 2 and 3, 2021.