Edward Paulino is an Associate Professor and faculty major advisor in the department of global history at CUNY's John Jay College. His first book Dividing Hispaniola traces the origin and relationship of the Dominican state with Haiti through its porous border region and its local citizens, including anti-Haitian policies such as the genocidal massacre of 1937. His forthcoming co-edited book with Prof. Megan Myers, The Border of Lights Reader: Bearing Witness to Genocide in the Dominican Republic will be published in July 2021 by Amherst College Press and is based on the organization he co-founded in 2012 called Border of Lights, which returns every year to the Dominican Republic and Haiti to bear witness to the victims of the 1937 Haitian Massacre while promoting historic solidarity and understanding between Haitians and Dominicans and supporting the citizenship rights of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Paulino has been interviewed for several media outlets such as the New York Times, and on MSNBC.
Since 2014 he has been performing in U.S. colleges and universities his one-man show (directed by Samantha Galarza) called “Eddie’s Perejil”: about growing up Dominican in New York City and discovering for himself the history of the 1937 Haitian Massacre. He also wrote the script for the Ted Ed series Ugly History: The 1937 Haitian Massacre which has garnered more than 1 million views.
Paulino is a member of the 50 Playwrights Project which “supports Latin@ playwrights by creating digital resources, disseminating research, and supporting new play development.” More recently he served as the historical consultant/advisor for Michèle Stephenson’s documentary Stateless (Apátrida). Since 2016 Paulino has been a co-editor of the Palgrave MacMillan Afro-Latin@ Diasporas Book Series. As part of the NEH-funded Making Objects Speak, portable audio guides for Teaching with Visual Culture in the Humanities” project, Paulino wrote and narrated (with Dr. Karen Graubart as the specialist-consultant), a free downloadable interactive audio-tour entitled “Converging Cultures: Latin America 1520-1830,” for the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s Andean art collection. Paulino is the board president of the non-profit Coalition for Immigrant Freedom in New York City that supports immigrant services and is currently working on several interdisciplinary writing projects.
