April Mayes

April J. Mayes focuses her research on the Dominican Republic and Haiti and teaches courses in Colonial Latin American history, Afro-Latin American history, and Latin American women's and gender studies. A graduate of Pomona College, Dr. Mayes attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor where she earned a Ph.D. in history (2003), with an emphasis in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, gender, ethnicity and race in the Americas, comparative post-emancipation studies and anthro/history. While at the University of Michigan, Dr. Mayes received the Dean's Mellon Award and a Rockefeller Grant to pursue research at the Dominican Studies Institute at City College (CUNY) in New York City. During her tenure at Pomona College, Mayes has received a Fulbright Research-Teaching Fellowship (2009-2010) for research in the Dominican Republic and raised over $30,000 from the Public Affairs Section of the United States Embassy to support major scholarly initiatives in the Dominican Republic, including the first Transnational Hispaniola Conference and the symposium, Intercambiando Historias: Género y Política en la República Dominicana.

 

April J. Mayes is the author of the monograph, The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race, and Dominican National Identity(University Press of Florida), and the co-editor, along with Ginetta Candelario (Smith College) and Elizabeth Manley (Xavier University), of the two-volume collection, Cien años de feminismos dominicanos, 1861-1961 (Archivo General de la Nación, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic). Her most recently published edited volume is the product of a ten-year collaboration with Kiran Jayaram, Transnational Hispaniola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies (University of Florida Press).  She is currently working on a textbook about women and politics in Latin America and a study about Haitian migration to the U.S.-Mexico border.

 

The Real Deal:

April J. Mayes is a first-generation college graduate, among the first in her family to earn a Ph.D. in anything;

 

She is the proud daughter of a Dominican immigrant and African American internal migrants. Growing up in California (thank you, U.S. military), she learned to be open-minded, independent, and collaborative;

 

I am the proud mami of two Afro-DominiJamaiquinos;

 

I play guitar and sing, not often enough, unfortunately;

 

I wish I was a better gardner