Dr. Rosalina Diaz, Associate Professor/Social and Behavioral Sciences

Dr. Diaz is a Puertoriqueña, born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She is an Anthropologist with research interests and publications in Gender, Identity, and Environmental Justice in the Caribbean; Historical Archaeology of the Caribbean; Ethnobotany of the Caribbean, and Education Inequality of Latinx and Caribbean Populations in the U.S. Prior to joining the faculty at Medgar Evers College (MEC), CUNY, in 2007, she was trained as a Cultural Anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History, earned a PhD from The CUNY Graduate Center and held adjunct faculty positions at Hunter College, Brooklyn College, City College and Borough of Manhattan Community College. She served as Director of the M.E.C Center for Teaching & Learning Excellence from 2013 to 2016 and founded the Latinx Heritage Month Celebration and the Association of Latinx Studies at MEC in 2008. In addition to her teaching responsibilities at M.E.C, she currently works with the University of Puerto Rico on several projects focusing on the Environmental Resilience of Island Communities in the Anthropocene. Her most recent publications include “Grito de Caguana” in ‘O Brave New World:’ in The Archaeology of Identity in Contexts of Dissonance, D. F. George and B. Kurchin (Eds.), University of Florida Press (2019) and Decolonizing Paradise: A Radical Ethnography of Environmental Stewardship in the Caribbean. New York: Peter Lang Publishing (2023). www.thewritingarchaeologist.com