DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  African History; Latin American and Caribbean History

Thematic Field(s):  African Diaspora and African American History; Environmental History; Religious History; Colonial, Imperial, & Diasporic History; War and Empire in History

Principal Research Interest(s):  Colonialism and Slavery in the Caribbean and Atlantic Africa (1470 – 1850).

Biography

Jonathan R. Rodriguez (Ph.D., University of South Florida, 2026) is an archaeologist and historian of the Atlantic World. His dissertation, “Territoriality and Freedom in the Bush: The Neg Mawon Landscape, Fugitive Geographies, and Settlement Ecologies,” combines historical research, GIS and spatial modeling, community-based archaeological survey, and oral history to examine the histories and cultural legacies of anti-slavery resistance in colonial Dominica. His most recent published work, “An imperium in imperio: A Geospatial Analysis of Defensibility and Accessibility of Maroon Settlements in Dominica,” (American Antiquity 89, no. 4) investigates the potential sociocultural and environmental landscape characteristics that determined where Maroon leaders’ decisions about where to establish their settlements. His forthcoming publication in Transforming Anthropology (accepted in 2026), critically examines colonial cartographies that rendered Maroon refuge spaces and places invisible, while counter-mapping the spatial practices, ecological knowledge, and resistance of Maroons during the slavery period and Dominican Rastas fleeing state-sanctioned violence and oppression.

Rodriguez is a co-principal investigator for the National Endowment for the Humanities Deep Mapping Fellowship Counter Mapping Landscapes of Indigenous and Black Resistance and Survivance in Colonial Dominica project. This collaborative project with scholars at Northwestern University, University of South Florida, and Rice University is in the process of developing an online platform to make archaeological, historical, and spatial data collected from the Archaeological Survey of Colonial Dominica (ASCD) available to the public. Dr. Rodriguez is a postdoctoral research scholar in the Material History Lab at Northwestern University working with Dr. Akin Ogundiran.

Publications

• “An imperium in imperio: A Geospatial Analysis of Defensibility and Accessibility of Maroon Settlements in Dominica,” American Antiquity 2024, 89(4), 627-646. Visit publication here.

• “Territoriality and Freedom in the Bush: The Neg Mawon Landscape, Fugitive Geographies, and Settlement Ecologies.” University of South Florida, 2026, ProQuest No. 32579066).

• “Untamed Ecologies and Fugitive Geographies in Colonial Dominica, 1763-1978,” forthcoming in Transforming Anthropology.

Awards and Honors

• 2026: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Material History Lab, Northwestern University.
• 2025: National Endowment for the Humanities Deep Mapping Fellowship, Michigan Technical University.
• 2025-2026: Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida.
• 2023-2024: U.S. Fulbright Student Research Program, Dominica.
• 2021-2026: McKnight Doctoral Fellowship, Florida Education Fund.
• 2020: Patrick Riordan Memorial Research Award in Florida Studies, University of South Florida Libraries Special Collections.