Lecturers
- Yamil Avivi
- Ph.D.
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Yamil Avivi (he/him) holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Michigan. He was a 2023-2024 Research Postdoctoral Fellow in Latina/o/e/x History at Pennsylvania State University. A Latinx Studies scholar, he revises and amplifies narratives of youth, queers, and immigrants. Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Avivi’s research and scholarly interests have focused in the area. He is a queer, cis-male second generation Colombian American immigrant with quarter Arab and Muslim ancestry.
In 1999, he conducted an independent oral history project on the Elizabeth Colombian community and published a 2003 essay entitled, “Recuperando la Historia de los Colombianos en Elizabeth: Redefiniendo la Historia de la Ciudad” in Sociedad y Economía. No. 5, Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia. From 2005-2008, Avivi was a graduate research fellow with the Newark Public Library’s New Jersey Hispanic Research Information Center (HRIC) lead by Dr. Olga Wagenheim, Rutgers Emeritus Professor of History. As a fellow, Avivi conducted statewide community profiles of Dominicans and Colombians, doing oral history interviewing for each.
Avivi’s publications include: “Latinx LGBTQ Students and Placemaking in School: Voguing and Ball Culture at Elizabeth High, 1989-1994,” in Latinas/os in New Jersey: Histories, Communities, and Cultures with Rutgers University Press, 2025; “‘Temos Muitas Coisas Para Fazer:’ Market Identities and Queer Community Building in the Brazilian Ironbound and Greater Newark,” in Queer Newark: Stories of Community, Love, and Resistance with Rutgers University Press in 2024; “Remembering Andre “Angel” Melendez: Rave Subculture’s Contested/Conflicted Memory of a Racially Motivated Murder,” in Researching Subcultures, Myth, and Memory with Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; “Puerto Rican Muslims in Post-9/11 Documentaries: Authenticity, Cultural Identity, and Communal Belonging” in Reframing Muslims: New Approaches to Islam in Film Routledge, 2021 and “¿Y qué de Andrés? On the Need for Queer-Centered Asylum Laws and Histories,” in the journal Latino Studies in its 2020 special issue on U.S. Colombianidades. His book manuscript, Young and Brown in New Jersey: Latinx Youth Subcultures is under contract with Rutgers University Press.
- Marimer Berberena
- Ph.D.
Marimer Berberena Alonso earned her PhD from the Africology and African American Studies department at Temple University. Her dissertation focused on the retention of African culture in Puerto Rico, observing the cultural continuity from ancient Egypt, its transfer to various Central and West African ethnic expressions, and their historical legacy in the Caribbean. Her Master’s thesis, from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, explored the Gagá (Rara) in New York City and the initiative of the hermandad cultural Gagá Pa’l Pueblo as a means of healing, community, and resistance by mainly Dominican migrants in the United States (https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/170/).
Her academic interests include the African contributions to Latin America and the Caribbean such as Santería, Gagá, Rastafari livity, Anansi stories, culture-making processes, political-spiritual manifestations, and social history theory. She has conducted research using multidisciplinary methodologies with a comparative cultural, historical, epistemological, symbolic, and ethnographic approach. Her current work focuses on the variations of traditional African tales in the Caribbean and Latin America, and in expanding Marimba Ani’s Matrix of Cultural Entity to the Caribbean. She also continues to study the Ancient Egyptian mores and folkways and their relevance in today’s modern society as well as the “African personality” in Puerto Rican culture.
Dr. Berberena has taught undergraduate courses on Caribbean culture and society, Latin American Studies, Sociology, Criminology, and Africology at Hostos Community College, SUNY Old Westbury, Lehman College, and Temple University. She is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Lehman College in the Latin American and Latino Studies and the Africana Studies departments. Aside from her academic work, she has also been involved in artistic and cultural initiatives such as Gaga Pa’l Pueblo, Mexicanos de Rostros Desconocido, and smArt Action.
- Antonio Hernandez Matos
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Antonio Hernández-Matos holds a PhD in History in Puerto Rico and the Hispanic Caribbean with a minor in modern United States from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. He did a master's degree in American history at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and his bachelor in secondary education with a concentration in history from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. His dissertation, “Estas cosas parecen triviales; pero son de más importancia de lo que se cree:” Fashion, Gender, and Modernity in Puerto Rican Periodicals, 1900-1930, examines how Puerto Ricans considered conceptions of modernity – and its discontents – through fashion (as dress and behavior) texts and images. It shows how they, participating of “transnational imagined interpretive communities,” appropriated transnational discourses on fashionability and modernity to construct modern gendered subjectivities, while, at the same time, keeping a tense relationship with the unfolding processes of a paradoxical and bewildering “colonial modernity.” It demonstrates that, in Puerto Rican society, one can discern between the “modern woman” and the “chica moderna,” and how people from across the social spectrum expressed their ambivalence, their fascination and fears, regarding them. It also examines conceptions of masculinity and show how Puerto Ricans distinguished between an accepted, normal/normalizing “hombres sí’ and a negative, deviant modern masculinity – “hombres nó.” He is the author of “Fashion and Modernity in Puerto Rico, 1920–1930,” “On the Complex Memory of a Pionero: A Cultural Analysis of Joaquín Colón’s Memoirs,” ““Hombres sí/Hombres nó:” Fashioning Masculinity in Early 20th Century Puerto Rico,” and “Constructing a Modern, Fashionable, and Consuming Subject: Men, Masculinity, and Fashion in Early 20th Century Puerto Rico” (forthcoming). He co-authored the textbook Estados Unidos de América: trayectoria de una nación (2010 and 2015). Has published book reviews in the journal European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (University of Amsterdam), and H-DIPLO (H-NET network) and has presented papers at universities in the United States and Puerto Rico. His research interests revolve around the construction of subjectivities/representations in a consumer society: the relationship among fashion, modernity, gender, sexuality, and consumption; and the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States, its relations with consumer society, and the links between history and memory in its historiography.
- Cynthia Sanchez-Gomez
- Erika J. Nava
- MPP
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Erika J. Nava, Research Associate, works for the Senate Majority Office (SMO) in Trenton, where she focuses on economic development and transportation policy. She is also a Part-time Lecturer at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Before joining SMO in February 2020, she was a policy analyst for New Jersey Policy Perspective, where she worked on immigration issues and how they relate to fiscal and economic policy.
Erika holds a MPP from Rutgers University’s Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, and holds a BA degree in Political Science and Latino Studies from Douglass College at Rutgers University.
Email:
- Merylou Rodriguez
- Ph.D., Higher Education
- Ed.M.
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Dr. Merylou Rodríguez is a first-generation scholar-practitioner in higher education with nearly a decade of professional experience across various functional areas. Born and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Dr. Rodríguez proudly hails from Puerto Rican and Dominican parents. Dr. Rodríguez recently completed her Ph.D. in Higher Education at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Dr. Rodríguez's dissertation employed Boricua-centric methodologies to understand Puerto Rican undergraduate narratives of persistence in higher education. Given the extensive gap in the literature on Puerto Ricans in higher education, she intends to bridge the existing scholarship from K-12 to shed light on Puerto Rican college students’ unique experiences. She contends that Puerto Rican college students' educational narratives can inform this population’s current conditions and offer insights with practical and policy implications. Currently, she serves as the Associate Director of Research and Assessment in the Department of Residence Life within the Division of Student Affairs at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Dr. Rodríguez has engaged in equity, justice, and access work as an undergraduate paraprofessional and continues to guide her career through this framework. Additionally, Dr. Rodríguez has been an instructor on record in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies, and the School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program.
- Courses: 01:595:299 Latinos and Community
- Eliezer Marcellus
- Ph.D.
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Assistant Dean, Rutgers University–Camden
Dr. Marcellus is an Assistant Dean at Rutgers University, Camden College of Arts and Sciences and regularly teaches mini-courses for the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies (LCS), such as "Haitians in the Diaspora" for Fall 2020. Dr. Marcellus serves as a Faculty Leader for the Department of Africana Studies/Health Sciences where students volunteer at local elementary schools in Haiti, working alongside doctors and nurses to promote public health.
This upcoming Spring semester, Dr. Marcellus will be teaching an exciting new 3-credit course called, "Global Haiti: 'NGOs in Haiti'” for LCS (01:595:337:01) where students will learn about NGO’s role in international humanitarian aid and development work.
- Courses: 01:595:337 Global Haiti
- Darius V. Echeverría
- Ph.D.
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Lecturer in American History and Dean
Columbia University in the City of New York
Columbia College | Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science
Department of History | Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
Professor Echeverría received his B.A. (magna cum laude) in History from Rutgers University and earned his Ph.D. in History from Temple University in Philadelphia. As a Lecturer in both Columbia’s Department of History and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER), he specializes in Latinx Studies, Mexican American History, Political History, Social Movements, and Sport and Society. He also leads the Senior Project Seminar for CSER, which is designed to develop and hone the skills necessary to complete an advanced senior thesis project. In addition to his teaching responsibilities at Columbia, he serves as an undergraduate academic dean. He has held his full-time dual appointments at Columbia University since 2013. Professor Echeverría has been a faculty member at Rutgers University since 2006, with the current standing of Lecturer II.
As a historian, his teaching, scholarship, and public engagement focus on inequality and social policy; cycles of agency related to constitutional rights; the American Presidency in historical perspective; the conjunction of film and television history; baseball studies; and the formation of racial, ethnic, class, national, and transnational identities. He is the author of Aztlán Arizona (University of Arizona Press, 2014), a history of the Chicano Movement in Arizona during the 1960s and 1970s. Furthermore, he has produced numerous publications, including book chapters, edited works, journal articles, essays, and digital content on not only the culture, history and life of Latinx communities, but on the broader American experience.
Previously, he also served as a political aide to New Jersey and federal government-appointed and elected officials, including the New Jersey Governor’s Office and presidential and senatorial administrations. Dr. Echeverría holds several leadership positions in national, statewide, regional, and university organizations, advisory councils, government task forces, and editorial boards.
- Robert Ramos
- M.A.
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Phone: 848-445-3872
Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University
Professor Ramos is a musicologist from the Rutgers Graduate School and Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He has been the instructor of the "Music in the Caribbean" course for the Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies department since 2009. Sponsored by the Center for Latino Arts and Culture, he managed and performed with the Rutgers Salsa Band in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. A drummer and percussionist, he currently performs and records in various musical styles, and teaches group and private music lessons, as well as his college classes in the Tri-state area.
- Hyacinth Miller
- M.A.
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Ph.D. Candidate, Global Urban Studies
M.A. Rutgers University, Political Science
B.A., cum laude Brooklyn College, Africana Studies and Political Science
Hyacinth Miller is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences–Newark. She also holds a concurrent appointment as a Lecturer in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers–New Brunswick. She also serves as the director of the public service leadership program for the Sheila Y. Oliver Center for Politics and Race in America at Rutgers-Newark.
A political scientist with an interdisciplinary approach, Professor Miller’s research centers on Black women’s political leadership, Caribbean political development, and Black immigrant political incorporation. Her current work examines the political engagement of Black women in elected office, both within the United States and internationally, focusing on campaign emergence, strategy, and the implications of electoral success for surrogate representation. Her ongoing research project, The Garden State's Black Politics, investigates Black women's political trajectories and influence in elected office across New Jersey.
This scholarship is part of a broader research agenda that critically explores the intersections of civic engagement, political representation, and policy responses to the needs of Global Africa. Professor Miller is also a co-founder of the Rutgers University Atlantic Reparatory Justice Research Lab, where she examines CARICOM's contemporary calls for reparations and the evolving political and legal responses to demands for redress.
Before joining Rutgers, Professor Miller built a public policy and advocacy career, with expertise spanning government affairs, immigration, criminal justice reform, nonprofit leadership, and institutional development. She has held roles with the U.S. House of Representatives, the New York City Council, the New York State Assembly, the Association of Paroling Authorities International, and the JEHT Foundation.