Reena Goldthree on Latin America and the Caribbean

Scholarship, as well as a chance meeting, brought Reena Goldthree, an assistant professor of African and African American Studies, to Dartmouth in 2010. As a PhD student at Duke, Goldthree was on a Fulbright scholarship in Trinidad when she encountered a group of Dartmouth undergraduates studying abroad. Around the same time, she learned about the College’s Thurgood Marshall Dissertation Fellowship. Goldthree, whose work focuses on the history of modern Latin America and the Caribbean, was planning to move back to the United States to finish writing her dissertation. “I thought this would be a great place to do it,” she says. “I could talk about my work and people would understand and be interested in the history of Trinidad and Tobago.”

What was your first experience in the Caribbean?
It was a family vacation to Jamaica in middle school. I thought it was one of the most fascinating and visually stunning places I’d ever visited. From a young age I have been interested in the way other people live, particularly people my age. I ended up becoming pen pals with a girl who lived in rural Jamaica. I also had a pen pal in South Africa and in Japan, which now seems so quaint in a world of digital communication.

Read the full interview here.