Assistant Professor Ingrid Brioso Rieumont awarded 2025-26 Whiting Foundation Fellowship

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Ingrid Brioso Rieumont, who has been awarded the 2025-26 Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation Fellowship for Higher Education of Present and Prospective Teachers.

The prestigious fellowship will support Professor Rieumont's archival research at the Cuban National Archive, the National Library, and the Municipal Museum of Regla in Havana, Cuba. Professor Rieumont will analyze rare 19th-century materials—including photographs, anthropological reports, literary manuscripts, and legal documents—to develop case studies for a new, evidence-based undergraduate course at Dartmouth College titled, Beautiful Disruptions: Reimagining 19th-Century Photographs and Manuscripts of Enslavement in Latin America.

Cuban archival materials remain largely unexplored, in contrast to the over 6,000 narratives of enslaved individuals documented in the Anglophone world. The course will invite students to engage with these rare materials, examining visual and textual representations of enslavement not only as historical records but also as cultural artifacts that shaped 19th-century ideologies, especially scientific racism. Pairing archival sources with contemporary Afro-Latin American artistic interventions, students will engage in theoretical analysis, creative writing, annotation, and speculative interpretation. Each student will select one document or photograph to explore through an artistic, critical "intervention." 

Invoking Michael Foucault's question—"How can the shock of these words evoke beauty?"—and Saidiya Hartman's assertion that "Beauty is a method," the course rethinks how to teach the history of transatlantic slavery and its legacies in Latin America. By blending aesthetics with philosophical and historical inquiry, it equips students to reflect on the archive's violence, silences, and its possibilities for reimagination.