I am a PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology and an American Studies Dissertation Fellow at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). My research grapples with questions of how ordinary people confront the converging crises of debt and climate catastrophe in Puerto Rico. My dissertation (expected defense May 2021), titled “The Politics of Debt and Disaster in Puerto Rico: Contesting Debt and Remaking Community after Hurricane Maria,” ethnographically analyzes how debt resistance and post-disaster mutual aid organizing attempt to reconfigure what debt and disaster recovery mean and for whom. My work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and recognized by the Ford Foundation and the Society for the Anthropology of North America. I am broadly interested in the anthropology of disaster, social movements, debt resistance, the politics of care, aging, and intersectional approaches. My area of focus is the Americas, especially Latin America and the Caribbean. 

I have published in various academic and public-facing outlets, including Society and Space magazine (2020), the edited volume Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket Books, 2019), Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society (2013), Alternautas (2018), The Platform, Anthropology News, FocaalBlog, Anthropology Now, and Social Difference Online. 

I am the Co-Founder of the Puerto Rico Syllabus, a feminist collective and digital/public humanities project that curates an archive of bilingual resources to critically understand Puerto Rico’s intersecting crises. The collective is dedicated to advancing theoretical, methodological, and sustainability conversations around digital social scholarship.

During my doctoral studies I served as a Lecturer in the Hunter College (CUNY) Department of Anthropology (2015-2016), where I taught an interdisciplinary course on “Caribbean Cultures and Societies” and an advanced anthropology seminar on ethnographic approaches to theory and methods called “Reading Ethnography.” I also served as the Events Coordinator at the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (CUNY Graduate Center) and as an Oral Historian for the Memorias project at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. 

Twitter: @SarahMolinari

Contact and inquiries: smolinari@gradcenter.cuny.edu 

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