Dr. Nicole Ramsey is an interdisciplinary cultural studies scholar with a focus on Central America and the Caribbean. She is an Assistant Professor of Latina/o Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Her research examines national identity, belonging, and representation across the Circum-Caribbean, with a particular emphasis on Belize and the Belizean diaspora in the United States. Dr. Ramsey’s work engages with the intersections of gender, migration, and identity, offering insights into how Black Central American and Caribbean communities navigate complex cultural and political terrains.

Her first book manuscript, Under the Shade I Flourish: Race, Performance, and the Cultural Politics of the Belizean Trans-Nation, is currently in progress. It explores how Black Belizeans negotiate identity, citizenship, and nationhood within Belize and across the Belizean diaspora. By engaging with African diaspora theory, Black Central American studies, and Caribbean feminist scholarship, her work highlights how Black Belizeans draw from various archives and diasporic resources in creating a transnational identity that pulls from multiple locations throughout the diaspora, is perpetually hybrid, gendered, ambiguous and that speaks to a very recent colonial past.

Dr. Ramsey earned her Ph.D. in African American & African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has been supported by the Center for Latin American Studies, the Institute of International Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Carter G. Woodson Institute. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Small Axe, Callaloo, The Forum for Inter-American Research, and the Journal of Latino Studies. She is also the co-founder and co-coordinator of The Black Central Americas Project, a digital humanities initiative focused on amplifying the experiences and histories of Black Central Americans.