Greetings!
I am a Lecturer of History and Literature at Harvard University, and a visiting scholar in the History Department at Tufts University. In 2012, I earned a Ph.D. in History from New York University, with research interests in the history of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the African Diaspora.
In my scholarship and teaching, I explore local-global connections, especially those moments in which ordinary women and men reached across national borders to unite in common cause. My research focuses on race and class solidarity movements across the Americas in the interwar period.
My forthcoming book manuscript, “Cosmopolitan Enclaves,” is about sugar workers in Cuba during the 1920s and 1930s, when powerful American corporations, including the United Fruit Company, dominated the island’s sugar industry. In my study of popular reactions to foreign capital, I argue that Cuban and West Indian immigrant workers seized the very avenues opened by U.S. companies in order to connect with their counterparts overseas and reformulate local struggles in global terms. These cosmopolitan sugar workers joined the era’s most significant movements for transnational solidarity, including Pan-Africanism, global communism, and anti-fascism.
Although scholars have long understood that foreign power provoked nationalist responses in Latin America, my study adds a new dimension by demonstrating that U.S. imperialism also generated diverse forms of internationalism. This project places Cuba squarely within emerging literature on south-south solidarity movements, and it expands popular and scholarly understanding of the long roots of “globalization from below.”
 | sullivan_cv_sept_5_2016.pdf | 71 KB |