Expert on Dominicans and New York City Answers Questions from Readers at The New York Times

In the New York Times' City Room section this week, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, the author of A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950 (Princeton University Press, 2008), will be answering selected readers’ questions about how New York has been transformed by the Dominican settlement and how Dominicans’ lives here have affected life in their native country.

Dr. Hoffnung-Garskof teaches at the University of Michigan History Department. He was born and raised in New Haven, and received a degree in social studies from Harvard College in 1993. He then worked for several years as an organizer and advocate in a bilingual Head Start program in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan. In 1999 and 2000, he lived and conducted fieldwork in Santo Domingo on his way to earning a Ph.D. in Latin American and Caribbean history from Princeton in 2002.