René Cordero is a historian of modern Latin America and the Caribbean. His focus specializes in the question of how peoples across the hemisphere envisioned and articulated freedom and sovereignty. His current manuscript project tells the institutional history of the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo (UASD), which played a significant role in the Dominican Republic’s national politics during the twentieth century. Through oral histories, photographs, state documents, and university archives, René chronicles the rise of this peculiar public institution as it witnessed and participated in the seismic political, demographic, and cultural transformations of Dominican society. René is also the coordinator of Opening the Archives Dominican Republic (OTA), a digital archive housed at the Brown Library that makes thousands of declassified documents about Dominican and U.S. relations during the Cold War available for scholars, students, and the public.