Bio
Richard J. Denis is a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of History at Florida International University and a historian of modern Cuba, Latin America, and the Caribbean. His research focuses on journalism, race, labor, and political culture, particularly the ways journalists and print workers shaped public life and negotiated the pressures of political power. He received his Ph.D. in Atlantic History from Florida International University in 2024.
His first book, Between Ink and Power: The Politics of Cuba’s National Press, 1940–1960, is under contract with the University Press of Florida. Moving from Cuba’s 1940 constitutional experiment through the Batista dictatorship and the first years of the Cuban Revolution, the book examines the political and professional world of the Cuban press during a period of extraordinary upheaval. It shifts attention from newspapers simply as vehicles of political opinion to the journalists, editors, publishers, and print workers who produced them, tracing their encounters with censorship, patronage, professionalization, racial discrimination, labor conflict, and revolutionary change.
Denis’s research also examines the Black press and the place of Afro-Cuban journalists within Cuba’s larger media world. His developing second project, Diasporic Publics: Afro-Cuban Journalism and Black Transnational Networks in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, follows Black journalists and publications across Cuba and the diaspora, exploring racial counterpublics, mainstream journalism, and competing strategies of integration and autonomy.
Denis has also worked extensively in archives and public history. At the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, he conducted archival research and contributed interpretive material for the exhibition 1898: U.S. Imperial Visions and Revisions. He coordinated the preservation and transfer of the Eduardo “Guayo” Hernández Collection to the University of Florida and is the founder of Digital Cuba, an archival digitization project dedicated to preserving endangered Cuban historical collections. His teaching spans U.S., Latin American, Caribbean, Atlantic, and world history.