Rachel Afi Quinn

Rachel Afi Quinn is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and Comparative Cultural Studies at University of Houston. She received her Ph.D. from the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan in 2012. Her scholarship focuses on race, mixed race identities, gender, and sexuality in the African Diaspora and she employs tools of transnational feminist theory, including ethnography and visual culture in her research. Her first book project is an interdisciplinary cultural studies analysis of the impact of neoliberal development and US popular media on Dominican women’s identities. Dr. Quinn was also a part of making the documentary film Cimarrón Spirit (2015) about Afro-Dominican identity. Most recently, her essay “El rostro negro dominicano y la Quisqueya queer de Rita Indiana Hernández [Dominican Blackface and the Queer Quisqueya of Rita Indiana Hernández]” was included in the 2016 collection Nuestro Caribe: Poder, Raza y Postnacionalismos para dinamitar el archipiélago LGBTQ, edited by Mabel Cuesta and published by Editorial Isla Negra. Dr. Quinn’s essay “‘No tienes que entenderlo, solo respetalo’: Xiomara Fortuna, Racism, Feminism and Other Forces in the Dominican Republic” was published in The Black Scholar in 2015.  In 2017, she helped start a social justice summer institute for South Asian college students in Houston.