Cruz-Taura, Graciella

Person

Cruz-Taura, Graciella

1951-

Graciella Cruz-Taura is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Florida Atlantic University. She specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of Latin America, with a specific focus on Cuban and Cuban-American studies. Dr. Cruz-Taura arrived in the U.S. from Cuba in 1962 and completed her PhD in History at the University of Miami in 1978 with a thesis titled: “The Impact of the Castro Revolution on Cuban Historiography.” She has authored, edited, and provided translations for a variety of scholarly works from books to stand-alone articles and chapters. In 1989 she co-edited Outside Cuba/Fuera de Cuba: Contemporary Cuban Visual Artists and in 2009 she published Espejo de paciencia y Silvestre de Balboa en la historia de Cuba. Cruz-Taura also completed an English-language edition of the latter work with the help of a D.F. Schmidt College Scholarly and Creative Activity Fellowship. Topics of her articles have included women’s rights and the Cuban constitution of the mid-twentieth century, education in Cuba, national identity in Cuba, and work on specific individuals such as José Martí. The breadth of Dr. Cruz-Taura’s research and teaching is vast – extending from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the present. Adjacent to her writerly endeavors, Cruz-Taura has curated exhibits devoted to Cuban history and the Cuban diaspora; for example, in 2005 she curated the exhibition: “In Search of Freedom: Cuban Exiles and the U.S. Refugee Program,” which drew from the collection of Cuban Refugee Center Records at the Cuban Heritage Collection and was originally displayed at Miami-Dade County’s Stephen P. Clark Building in 2005 and later, in abridged form, in the Roberto C. Goizueta Pavilion in the Otto G. Richter Library in 2011. From 2003 to 2016, Cruz-Taura served on the Board of the AMIGOS of the Cuban Heritage Collection. She is known as an advocate and authority pertaining to the Cuban-American population and has been recognized for her service to the South Florida community in particular in various capacities.

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Biographical note written July 2020 by Laura Bass, UGrow fellow for the Department of Manuscripts and Archives Management, 2019-2020, and updated by Amanda Moreno, September 2020.