Department of History

René Cordero works on Latin American social movements and politics during the Cold War. He is particularly interested in examining the left and right wing political narratives of the nation during the 1960s and 1970s in the Dominican Republic and how these narratives opened up new possibilities for democracy and the Dominican Republic’s checkered relationship with Haiti. More specifically, René examines how the student movement in the Dominican Republic galvanized different sectors of Dominican society and embraced a hemispheric and global circulation of discourses on racial consciousness, anti-imperialism and historical revisionism. His work attempts to place the Dominican Cold War experience at the center of debates about imperialism, third-worldism and race. He is also the coordinator, under the directorship of Professor James Green, of the Dominican section of Opening the Archives, an online archive housed at the Brown Library that documents U.S.-Dominican relations during the Cold War.​