Antonio Sotomayor

Antonio Sotomayor is an associate professor and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has aditional faculty appointments in the Departments of History, and Spanish and Portuguese, where he has served on various MA thesis and PhD dissertation committees. His book, The Sovereign Colony: Olympic Sport, National Identity, and International Politics in Puerto Rico (winner of SALALM's 2017 José Toribio Medina Book Award), was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2016. In 2020 he co-edited with Dr. Cesar R. Torres the book Olimpismo: The Olympic Movement in the Making of Latin America and the Caribbean (finalist in the 2021 Best Anthology Award from the North American Society for Sport History). His work appears in journals such as The Latin Americanist, Hispania Nova, The Americas, Caribbean Studies, and The International Journal of the History of Sport, among others. In 2025, he published Familia y poder en Puerto Rico: los Sotomayor y sus parentelas entre los siglos XVI y XVIII (San Juan: Editorial Luscinia C.E.), an academic genealogical study of certain elite families in early Spanish Puerto Rico. He is currently finishing the book entitled, Religious Games: The YMCA, Sport, and Imperial Statecraft in Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1898-1940s, which is under contract with the University of Nebraska Press. He is the Past-President of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM), the principal international organization of librarians, archivist, and bookdealers with interest in Latin America and the Caribbean.