Sandy Placido

Sandy Placido is a historian with a Ph.D. in American Studies who specializes in the history of Latinx people, as well as the interconnected histories of the places—the Caribbean, Latin America, the United States, Africa, and Europe—that over the last five hundred years have contributed to the creation of the Latinx social group.

More specifically, her research and teaching bring together and expand Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, African, Third World, leftist, Cold War, Caribbean, United States, and Latin American historiographies, as well as the histories of women, science, medicine, public health, and immigration enforcement. Her work in Latinx history is rooted in a longstanding interest in the history of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean (the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Cuba) and its diasporas. 

She is completing her first book, in English or Spanish, on Dr. Ana Livia Cordero, a Cold War-era Puerto Rican physician, revolutionary theorist, and organizer who dedicated her life to Puerto Rican liberation. She facilitated so that Cordero's entire archival collection could be preserved at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women at Harvard. She has also spent the last several years writing about Dominican women’s history in the nineteenth and twentieth century, with a focus on individuals such as Evangelina Rodríguez (the first female physician in the Dominican Republic), peasant organizer Mamá Tingó, and revolutionary feminist Magaly Pineda.

This research combines with her work on Cordero, since all these women were anti-imperialist activist-intellectuals. Her overall research agenda is to continue contributing to essential but underrepresented studies of the Caribbean that cut across multiple nations. She has published in American National Biography, Black Perspectives, Lux Magazine, Gender: Love, The Washington Post, Latinx Talk, The Journal of African American History, and La Galería Magazine.