Katie Duarte

I am a Bronx-raised Afro-Dominicana. After completing my bachelor's degree in Economics at Vassar College, I worked as a research assistant at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute (DSI) under the tutelage of Dr. Ramona Hernández and I worked as a legal administrative assistant for the Reproductive Freedom Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). As a PhD Candidate in Sociology at Brown University, my research interests include gender and sexuality, cultural understandings, identity formation, race theory, and social meaning-making for people of Dominican descent in the US and in the Dominican Republic. I am working on a research project about the dating and sexual experiences of young Dominican women in New York City before the COVID-19 pandemic (2019) and during the pandemic (2020-2021). My dissertation research examines the growing acceptance of natural or curly hair in the transnational Dominican community in the US and the Dominican Republic and related processes of racial and gender identities.