Dara E. Goldman (1971–2022): Caribbean Studies, Latin American Studies, Jewish Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Dara E. Goldman (1971–2022):Caribbean Studies, Latin American Studies, Jewish Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies Marilyn G. Miller (bio) Dara E. Goldman, associate professor in the department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese and director of the Program in Jewish Studies and Culture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), passed away unexpectedly on May 13, 2022 at the age of fifty-one. She was preparing to travel to the Biennial Scholars Conference of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) at Tulane University the following day. As one of the members of the planning committee for the AJHS meeting, dedicated to the theme of "Building Bridges in the Americas," Goldman was also scheduled to present a paper titled "Goulash and Plátanos: Sosua and the Myth of Dominican Whiteness," which in typical fashion addressed her passionate interests in Caribbean, Jewish, Latin American, and race studies. Dara was also putting together a special issue of Shofar on Jewishness and the Caribbean, based on a symposium she had co-organized at UIUC in 2021. Professor Goldman earned a BA in Latin American Studies (1992) and MA in Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages (1994) at Columbia University. She received her PhD in Spanish from Emory University in 2000 with a dissertation titled "Lost and Found: Insularity and the Construction of Subjectivity in Hispanic Caribbean Literature," directed by Carlos J. Alonso. Now Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor in the Humanities at Columbia, Alonso recalls: Dara's dissertation was an attempt to underscore an overarching coherence to the field of Caribbean Studies, a difficult undertaking given the linguistic, geographic, and colonial historical differences among the countries and areas it encompasses. Dara's powerful proposal was to argue that the trope of insularity itself, in all its enabling and contradictory permutations, was the rhetorical scaffolding that might transcend all those divergences while respecting their idiosyncrasies. That dissertation was later turned into Out of Bounds: Islands and the Demarcation of Identity in the Hispanic Caribbean [End Page 227] (2008), a book that is still a touchstone for any scholar who engages the Caribbean as a cultural matrix. Beyond her scholarly achievements, Dara was a generous, upbeat person, whose uproarious laughter could just as effectively dismantle an academic argument as become the life of the party. We have been diminished intellectually and personally by her untimely disappearance in ways that will only become even more evident with the passing of time. Intellectually courageous and innovative, Dara generously shared her prodigious gifts as leader, collaborator, and team builder. She situated herself at the forefront of many fields simultaneously, as well as in the interstices between them. Besides helming the Program in Jewish Studies and Culture since 2018, Dara also served twice at UIUC as Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center/Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies, in 2005–6 and 2011–15. She was affiliated with Comparative and World Literatures, Gender and Women's Studies, the Latina/Latino Studies Program, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretative Theory, the Center for Global Studies, and Women and Gender in Global Perspectives. The recipient of numerous fellowships and research grants during her time at UIUC, she was honored most recently with the 2022 Alumna Achievement Award at Columbia University. Besides publishing Out of Bounds, Dara co-edited a special issue of American Literary History titled "Twenty-First Century Jewish Writing and the World." She published numerous scholarly essays in edited volumes and journals in both English and Spanish, including the International Journal of Cuban Studies, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Latino Studies, the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Hispanic Review, Revista Iberoamericana, Chasqui, and Cuadernos Americanos. Caribbeanist colleagues such as Sarah Casteel (Carleton University, Canada) and I wish to emphasize the unique role Dara played in opening up the nascent field of Caribbean Jewish Studies. She helped define that field as the domain not just of historians, but also of scholars of literature and culture, stretching from the early modern period to the present. This crucial role was on full display in the...

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