Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof specializes in the history of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and of Caribbean migration and settlement in the United States..

His first book, A Tale of Two Cities, Santo Domingo and New York After 1950 (2008) tells an intertwined history of working-class neighborhoods in New York and Santo Domingo in the period when Santo Domingo grew from a small town into a sprawling metropolis and Dominicans became the largest immigrant group in New York. A second book, Racial Migrations: New York and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean (2019), traces the history of one of the earliest Afro-Latinx communities in the United States: a group of Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants to New York City who became writers, intellectuals, and close allies of the Cuban poet, politician, and revolutionary José Martí. He is co-editor and translator with Paulina Alberto and George Reid Andrews of Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960. He is currently at work on a project about a group of African-born people who, after securing their freedom, left Cuba to settle in Key West, Florida at the end of the 19th century.

Hoffnung-Garskof received his Ph.D. in History from Princeton University in 2002 and taught for twenty years at the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Harvard. At Michigan he was founding director of the Immigrant Justice Lab, a collaborative project to produce public scholarship with community partners in the field of immigration and asylum law, now shared between the University of Michigan and Harvard.

Select Publications:

Alberto, Paulina Laura, George Reid Andrews, and Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, eds. Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870–1960. Afro-Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Racial migrations: New York City and the revolutionary politics of the Spanish Caribbean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. (Also published in Spanish)

A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.