David Sartorius

David Sartorius is associate professor of history and a faculty affiliate of the Latin American Studies Center and the Department of Women's Studies. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in 2003 and is a historian of Latin America focusing on race, empire, and mobility in the Caribbean.  His book, Ever Faithful:  Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empre in Spanish Cuba, was published by Duke University Press in 2013, and examines the racial politics of colonial rule, including the support of Cubans of African descent, slave and free, for the Spanish government.  He has co-edited two special issues of journals dedicated to transnational history:  "Dislocations across the Americas" (Social Text, 2010) and "Revolutions and Heterotopias" (Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2012). He is also the author of essays about free-colored militias, race and historical memory, slave provision grounds, the 1812 Spanish Constitution, and the place of Darwinism and anthropology in nineteenth-century Cuba.  His current research considers the use of passports to and from Cuba during the nineteenth century as a window into questions of mobility, materiality, and classification.

Sartorius is currently the co-editor of Social Text, an assistant editor of The Americas, and a member of the organizing collective of Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas.