Dr. Joan Flores-Villalobos joins Ohio State as an assistant professor in the Department of History. She received her PhD in African diaspora history at New York University. Her research and teaching focus on Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latino histories of women and gender, migration and labor. Her book manuscript uses transnational archives to examine how black West Indian women who interacted with the U.S. territory of the Panama Canal Zone in the early 20th century created zones of economic, affective and social autonomy during a period of massive mobility and imperial consolidation.