Melina Pappademos

Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies, Director of Africana Studies

Dr. Melina Pappademos earned a Ph.D. in history and African diaspora studies from New York University. Her research and teaching interests focus on the social and cultural history of race and social and political mobilizations among people of African descent in the Caribbean. Dr. Pappademos is the director of the Africana Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut and is Executive Director of the Andrew W. Mellon and New England Humanities Consortium, Faculty of Color Working Group, which addresses the disproportionate needs of BIPOC faculty in the New England region.

Supported by New York University, the Ford Foundation, Harvard University, Wesleyan University, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Research program, Dr. Pappademos published her award-winning book, Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic (University of North Carolina Press, Envisioning Cuba series). The book was awarded the Murdo J. Macleod Best Book Prize by the Southern Historical Association. It reconstructs historical patterns of black Cuban political activism and their relationship to the political structures and cultures of the Cuban republic (1902-1959). Her second book project, funded by a University of Connecticut Research Foundation Large Grant and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, examines racial symbolism during Cuba’s turbulent 1930s and 1940s.