Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Daniel A. Rodriguez is Associate Professor of History. His work examines the social history of Latin America and the Caribbean, with a focus on 19th- and 20th-century Cuba. His first book, The Right to Live in Health: Medical Politics in Postcolonial Havana (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), explores how struggles over disease and health shaped the lives of Havana’s residents during the transition from colonial rule to independence. His work has also appeared in Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of Social History, and Cuban Studies/Estudios Cubanos, among others, and his more recent work examines the history of race, policing, and incarceration during Cuba’s transition out of slavery. His other teaching and research interests include the history of welfare and philanthropy, the history of crime and punishment in the Americas, and the history of gender and sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean. During his Fall 2026 Cogut Faculty Fellowship, he will work on his book project about  the history of childhood in post-emancipation Cuba, examining how new labor, political, and carceral regimes transformed the meanings of childhood as well as the lived experiences of poor children in the decades after slavery.