Dara E. Goldman, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese and Director of the Program in Jewish Studies and Culture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, passed away unexpectedly on May 13, 2022 at the age of 51. She was preparing to travel to a gathering of the American Jewish Historical Society at Tulane University the following day. One of the members of the planning committee for the AJHS meeting, dedicated to the theme of “Building Bridges in the Americas,” Dr. Goldman was also scheduled to present a paper titled “Goulash and Plátanos: Sosua and the Myth of Dominican Whiteness” which in typical fashion addressed her passionate interests in Caribbean, Jewish, Latin American, and race studies. Dara was also putting together a special issue of Shofar on Jewishness and the Caribbean, based on a symposium she had co-organized at UIUC in 2021.
Professor Goldman earned a B.A. in Latin American Studies (1992) and M.A. in Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages (1994) at Columbia University. At Emory University she received her Ph.D. in Spanish in 2000 with a dissertation titled “Lost and Found: Insularity and the Construction of Subjectivity in Hispanic Caribbean Literature,” directed by Prof. Carlos J. Alonso. Now Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor in the Humanities at Columbia, Dr. Alonso recalls that “Dara’s dissertation was an attempt to underscore an overarching coherence to the field of Caribbean Studies, a difficult undertaking given the linguistic, geographic, and colonial historical differences among the countries and areas it encompasses. Dara’s powerful proposal was to argue that the trope of insularity itself, in all its enabling and contradictory permutations, was the rhetorical scaffolding that might transcend all those divergences while respecting their idiosyncrasies. That dissertation was later turned into Out of Bounds: Islands and the Demarcation of Identity in the Hispanic Caribbean (2008), a book that is still a touchstone for any scholar who engages the Caribbean as a cultural matrix.”
Besides helming the Program in Jewish Studies and Culture since 2018, Dara also served twice at UIUC as Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center/Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies, from 2005-2006 & 2011-2015. The recipient of numerous fellowships and research grants during her time at UIUC, she most recently was honored with the 2022 Alumna Achievement Award at Columbia University.
Dara co-edited a special issue of American Literary History on “Twenty-First Century Jewish Writing and the World” and published numerous scholarly essays in edited volumes and journals in both English and Spanish. Caribbeanist colleagues such as Prof. Sarah Casteel (Carleton University, Canada) and I wish to emphasize the unique role Dara played in opening up the nascent field of Caribbean Jewish studies and defining that field as not just the domain of historians but also of scholars of literature and culture, and one that stretched from the early modern period to the present. This crucial role was on full display in the 2021 symposium “Next Year in the Caribbean,” organized by the Program in Jewish Culture & Society at UIUC https://files.webservices.illinois.edu/9662/next_year_caribbean.pdf. In her own presentation for that event, Goldman offered a rich analysis of Oskar Pinis’ 1931 Cuban Yiddish poem “Hatuey” and its recent operatic adaptation. Through her reading of a Yiddish epic devoted to an Indigenous Taíno leader and recited by Cuban schoolchildren in its Spanish translation, Goldman showed the need to recover Jewish presences in Cuban literary history and national narrative. More broadly, through the symposium, Goldman and her co-organizer Dana Rabin provided a space for highlighting the Caribbean as an incubator of the convergence of Jewishness and Afro-Creole cultures.
The Cuban-American writer and translator Achy Obejas, whom Goldman had recently profiled for the Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, said of Dara, “She was lovely, brilliant and sensitive. I’ve always been so grateful to her for her vision, her curiosity, her manner of seeing the world. She revealed aspects of my own work to me that even I had not seen. This is an immense loss; it leaves a very large emptiness.”
The Professor Dara E. Goldman Memorial Fund has been established at UIUC in her name: https://jewishculture.illinois.edu/giving/dara-goldman-fund.
