Founder
Medardo Gabriel Rosario is an assistant professor in the Department of Modern Languages at Florida International University. He obtained a Bachelor of Science with a concentration in Chemistry from the University of Puerto Rico (2005) and a Master of Arts with a concentration in Chemistry from Brown University (2006). Subsequently, he earned a Master of Arts with a concentration in Hispanic Studies also from the University of Puerto Rico (2014) and a doctorate in Hispanic and Portuguese-Brazilian Studies from the University of Chicago (2020). His academic research revolves around two themes: the influence of Spanish Golden Age literature in Latin America and representations of the Caribbean in cartography and literature developed in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries.
Design Director
Dr. Alexander S. Butler is an assistant professor of social studies methods and content in Bowling Green State University’s Inclusive Early Childhood Education Program and the Editor of Trends and Issues in Social Studies, the Florida Council for the Social Studies’ flagship journal. His Ph.D. is from Indiana University in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis on Teacher Education and The Learning and Developmental Sciences.
He has extensive experience working with K-12 and higher education students in a variety of contexts. He has been a classroom teacher, wrap-around service provider, coach, senior instructional designer, and Director of the Master of Science in Curriculum and Instruction Social Studies Track at Florida International University. Additionally, he is an expert at curriculum development, having built curricula for K-12 schools, universities, and non-profit organizations across the world (i.e., Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Ghana, and U.S.).
His research focuses on several topics, including: teacher candidates’ beliefs and conceptions of teaching, learning, and historical thinking skills, the purposes of social studies in the field of education, and K-12 students’ perceptions of the Caribbean. He has published in academic journals in the U.S. and Turkey and contributed a chapter in Be(com)ing Strange(r): Towards a Posthuman Social Studies (2023), which won the Critics’ Choice Award Winner for 2023 from the American Educational Studies Association. He was recently awarded a Midwest Teaching with Primary Sources grant through the Library of Congress and selected as 2024 Caribbean Digital Scholarship Summer Institute Recipient.
Ra Bacchus is a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Miami. He earned a Bachelor of Arts with honors and a Master's in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2018 and 2019, respectively. A budding digital humanist, Ra’s projects with texts and technologies advocate for interdisciplinary, multimodal, and affective ways of knowing from the Black Atlantic. His academic research concerns a long history of "hallucinations," from premodern anxieties to the postmodern rhetorics of machine learning and A.I.