Dr. Marina del Sol, Ph.D.

Biographical Sketch: Marina del Sol received her Ph.D. from the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Currently, she is a Master Instructor in the English Department at Howard University. Dr. del Sol’s work in the digital humanities focuses on citizenship in the public sphere. As a scholar with the Black Book Interactive Project, she received formal training in digital humanities theories and methods. During the summer of 2021, she was a Digital Scholarship Fellow with LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections at UT Austin. Using key term development and text mining, her project, “Prison Poets, Writ Writers, and Crimmigration,” located connections between prison activism and Chicano cultural arts. As an ethnographer, Dr. del Sol looks at visibility and belonging with a focus on the ways in which the state attempts to create docile bodies through surveillance and social control. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in residential treatment centers for foster children, a homeless shelter, a prison for boys, and a domestic violence shelter for families. Her current project, Adrift: Narratives of Mass Incarceration among Chicana Wards of the State, looks at experiences of hyper-visibility in juvenile facilities.