Sara I. Rodríguez Rivera joins the Art History PhD program in the fall of 2023. She completed her Master of Architectural History with a certification in Historic Preservation at the University of Virginia in spring of 2023. Her main research interests focus on Spanish Caribbean art and architecture of the late nineteenth-century to the mid-twentieth-century. She is currently researching the history and material culture of the Spanish Caribbean haciendas with an emphasis on an interdisciplinary study of gender and space. During her time in the program, she worked as a research assistant to faculty and as a museum intern at the collection department of The Fralin Museum. She was the recipient of 2022-2023 Frederick Douglas Nichols Thesis Research Award that allowed her to conduct research for her MA thesis project titled “Black Women in the Making of the Hacienda Irurena: A Re-interpretation of a Coffee and Sugar Plantation Landscape in Puerto Rico.” In the spring of 2023, she was the class graduate recipient of the Frederick Doveton Nichols Award for outstanding academic achievements.