Professor Ada Ferrer

Ada Ferrer is Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, where she has taught since 1995. She is the author of Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021), which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History. In 2014, she published Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press), winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize granted by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance at Yale, the Haiti Illumination Prize by the Haitian Studies Association, and multiple prizes from the American Historical AssociationHer first book, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999) won the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history. Ferrer’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Washington Post, The Hill, Huffington Post, Letras Libres (Mexico), and the American Historical Review.  She has held fellowships from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among others. Born in Cuba and raised in the United States, she has been traveling to island regularly since 1990.

Ferrer is currently working on two projects: a biography of a Black carpenter, artist, and revolutionary in early nineteenth-century Havana, and an intimate family history of revolution and migration that spans over a century of Cuban and U.S. history.