David Sartorius

David Sartorius is associate professor of history and a faculty affiliate of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center and the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality 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 Empire 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, falsified passports, 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 director of the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies and an assistant editor of The Americas and a member of the organizing collective of the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas. He was the co-editor of Social Text from 2017 to 2024 and served on the editorial board of the Hispanic American Historical Review from 2023 to 2026.