Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Dr. Margarita Lila Rosa is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University, specializing in Afro-Latin American and Black Atlantic history. An award-winning historian, Rosa’s historical academic scholarship has been published in the Caribbean Quarterly, The Journal of African American History, and Slavery & Abolition, among others. Rosa has also held teaching and research positions at Stanford University and Baruch College. Her archival research spans the Afro-Indigenous histories across the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil, with a focus on gender, maroonage, rebellion, and material histories.

Rosa won the 2024 Letitia Woods Article of the Year Award from the Association of Black Women Historians, for her article in the Journal of African American History. Her scholarly work reflects a robust vision for further advancing Black feminist traditions with a focus on the Afro-diasporic global south. She is currently working on a trade book manuscript titled Destruction of the Indies. Drawing upon archives across Spain and the Caribbean, alongside early modern books, debates, and drawings, historian Dr. Margarita Lila Rosa reconstructs the first century of colonization, from forced labor, to tributary systems and encomiendas, and finally, to the TransAtlantic Slave Trade that transformed the world.