Diego Javier Luis, PhD

Diego Javier Luis is the Rohrbaugh Family Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He studies the colonial histories of Latin America and the Pacific World, race-making, and Afro-Asian diasporic convergences.

 

His first book, The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History, is out with Harvard University Press. 

 

The First Asians in the Americas is "the definitive account of transpacific Asian movement through the Spanish empire—from Manila to Acapulco and beyond—and its implications for the history of race and colonization in the Americas" (from the Harvard site).
 
Luis's second project, "Manila and Acapulco: A Tale of Two Cities in the Early Modern Black Pacific," aims to uncover the early, hidden histories of African diaspora to and through the Pacific Ocean.

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Luis conducts archival research in Spain, Mexico, the Philippines, and the U.S.