I am a graduate of the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and received my Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science in August of 2011. My areas of specialization are Comparative Politics and Race and Ethnicity Politics. My research focuses on comparative racial politics, and more specifically, racial ideology and racial attitudes in Latin America. My dissertation, Uncovering Blackness: Racial Ideology and Black Consciousness in Contemporary Cuba, examines racial ideology in Cuba, a union of the ideology of racial democracy and socialist ideology, and its effects on racial attitudes among Cubans and identity formation and racial consciousness among blacks in particular. The project uses survey data on black racial attitudes and identity and interview data among Cubans of all races collected in Havana in 2008 and 2009 to determine not only the scope of black identity, but how whites, blacks and mulattoes view race in their everyday lives. I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University.