Dr. Alexa Rodríguez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia and a 2024-26 postdoctoral fellow for the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation. Her research examines schools, migration, and the formation of racial and national identities in both Latin America and the United States. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Crafting Dominicanidad (forthcoming with University of North Carolina Press), an intellectual history that examines how Dominicans used public schools to articulate and circulate competing notions of racial, class, and national identity during the early twentieth century. She is also director of the digital humanities project, Dominican Voices Project/Proyecto Voces Dominicanas, a bilingual digital archive that consists of audio and videotaped interviews of Dominicans born and raised in the Dominican Republic between 1920 and 1960. The project preserves local histories and educates students, teachers, and the general public in the Dominican Republic and the US about the history of education and childhood during the early 20th-century Dominican Republic. Her work has been published in History of Education Quarterly, Latino Studies, City & State New York, Clio and the Contemporary, and the blog of the History of Education Society in the UK.
Dr. Rodriguez was formerly a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Associate at UVA. Prior to joining UVA, Dr. Rodriguez worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the Dominican Studies Institute of the City University of New York (CUNY DSI). Dr. Rodriguez completed her Ph.D. in History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, her M.S. Ed. in Educational Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and her B.A. in History and American Studies at Fordham University. Dr. Rodriguez was also a 2020 dissertation fellow for the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation.