Anne Eller

Anne Eller is an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean history.  She received her degree in the history of the African Diaspora and Latin America from NYU; her dissertation received the Dean’s prize for outstanding dissertation in the humanities, 2011-2012. She is a former Fulbright-Hays scholar and her work has been supported by multiple research and writing fellowships.

 

Eller’s first book, We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom, focuses on the reoccupation of the Dominican Republic by Spain in 1861 as well as the popular anti-colonial movement that followed.  In the book, Eller deepens study of the impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic world and breaks from paradigms that emphasize perpetual conflict between Haitians and Dominicans in the nineteenth century. She contextualizes the small body of writing of Dominican elites with new analyses of inclusive and popular histories of identity, community, and freedom, summoning sources that range from trial records and consul reports to fragments of poetry and song. Rethinking Dominican relationships with their communities, the national project, and the greater Caribbean, Eller shows how popular anticolonial resistance, as well as Caribbean anti-slavery movements across multiple islands and coasts, were anchored in a rich and complex political culture that traveled beyond individual shores. The narrative traces the complicated history of Dominican emancipation and independence between 1822 and 1865 in the context of emancipation struggles throughout the Americas. Her book won Honorable Mention in both the Isis Duarte Book Prize of the Latin American Studies Association and the Avant Garde Book Prize of the Haitian Studies Association in 2017. We Dream won the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly publication at Yale in 2018.

 

Currently, Eller’s research explores the political struggles over emancipation and popular politics in greater Caribbean and hemispheric context during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Her work has been published in the The American Historical Review, Small Axe, and other fora. She has participated in colloquia at venues like the Dominican National Archives and Philadelphia’s Taller Puertorriqueño and in the Digital Library of the Caribbean’s online exhibit “Haiti: An Island Luminous.”