Orlando Inoa

2016 National Supermarket Association Dominican Studies Fellowship

Orlando Inoa is a Ph.D. candidate in Rural Sociology from Pennsylvania State University. He has taught history at various universities such as Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM) and Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD) in the Dominican Republic. He holds an MA in Latin American Studies from the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. His research interests include Dominican history, the history of Dominican ethnic groups, the Trujillo dictatorship, Dominican peasants, marginalized people and migration, among others. Prof. Inoa is also the founder of several renowned and path-breaking book publishing initiatives in the Dominican Republic.

As one of the winners of the 2016 National Supermarket Association (NSA) Dominican Studies Fellowship, Prof. Inoa is conducting research on the contributions of Dr. Marcos Charles, renowned medical doctor of Dominican ancestry, to the Dominican community in New York City. For his research, Prof. Inoa will conduct in-depth personal interviews, first with Dr. Charles himself and then with several leaders and representatives of the institutions and groups that Dr. Charles has participated in during his extensive career in New York City.

At the end of his research, Prof. Inoa will donate these materials to the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Archives and Library so that they can be processed, preserved, and used by other scholars similarly interested in the history of the Dominican community in New York. He hopes the result of his research on Dr. Charles may become a source of inspiration for other researchers, motivating them to study other Dominican figures of similar stature in the United States.

Prof. Inoa’s engagement with Dominican history stems from his own concerns as a sociologist about social and political problems in the Dominican Republic. He studied Sociology at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo in the 1970s and there he interacted with well-established Dominican historians. Currently, Prof. Inoa teaches in the FLACSO-Santo Domingo academic program as well as at the Dominican Ministry of Foreign Relations.