Daniel Morales-Armstrong

I am a joint PhD student in History and Africana Studies. Prior to Penn, I served as an adolescent educator in Washington Heights and The Bronx, where I taught Black Latin American history, writing, and prepared students for post-secondary success in my home communities. Working alongside my student collaborators, I facilitated local and international initiatives to research, analyze, and tell our own personal, community, and Afro-Caribbean histories. These experiences inform my approach to history: considering whose voices, histories, and narratives prevail, and whose are plagued by silences. 

At Penn, my work interrogates those silences within Black Puerto Rican history. My research focuses on slavery, emancipation and unfreedom in 19th century Puerto Rico, particularly as related to the post-emancipation labor contracting system. This includes significant considerations about the limitations inherent in colonial archives - from the racial, gendered and classed paradigms that distort mis/representations of enslaved people’s lives, to the silences created by the movement of documents from Spanish colonies to the metropole. 

In addition to my doctoral research, much of my academic service at Penn is dedicated to honoring the diverse iterations, and histories, of Black life in the hemisphere. To that end, I am part of an interdisciplinary cadre of Penn faculty and students working to expand the University’s scholarship and programming engaging Black communities in Latin America. As a public historian, I have presented my work through in-person and virtual events in secondary schools, university lectures, conferences, museums, and community bookstores.

Advisors: Dr. Roquinaldo Ferreira (History); Dr. Grace Sanders Johnson (Africana Studies).