Claudia González-Díaz

Claudia González-Díaz is a first-year PhD student who examines 20th-century material culture of the Caribbean. She earned B.A.s in art history and French at Indiana University Bloomington in 2023 and a master’s degree in art history at Tulane University in 2026. Her master’s thesis explored the imperialist and capitalist meanings that U.S. photographers attached to machetes, an everyday tool, via landscape photographs sometimes populated by farmworkers in rural Puerto Rico in 1946 and 1976. 

At UVA, Claudia researches labor, landscape, craft, and the circulation of materials across the United States and the Caribbean under the direction of Professor Tatiana Flores. She draws methods from digital humanities, material culture studies, Spanish and English literature, and art history to analyze objects such as tools and their representations. 

Claudia is also engaged in public-facing scholarship as a project co-manager at DigitalArc, an American Council of Learned Societies-funded digital community archiving toolkit. In this initiative, her team partners with three Midwest communities located in Gary, IN; Roberts Settlement, IN; and Oxford, OH, to support them in building non-custodial, digital archives. Peer-reviewed documentation recorded in the “toolkit” as well as two years of personal support enables partners to grow their digital archive and decide how they want to present their histories to their own communities and/or the public. Claudia has also curated pop-up, DIY, and gallery group exhibitions and has led public programs for each in Bloomington, IN, and New Orleans. Previously, Claudia has held internships at the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in Santurce.