CUNY Center for Puerto Rican Studies: Research Associate Program Fellows
The Center for Puerto Rican Studies invites a second round of applications for the 2024-2025 cohort of the CENTRO Research Associate Program. For this round, we are accepting applications for: Hybrid/remote fellows, independent researchers, artists, and dissertation fellows. The fellowships are held for one year (August 2024-July 2025). Fellows will spend their time at CENTRO working on a specific research project that applies to our inaugural theme, Archives, Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico, and will be required to attend weekly seminar meetings, as well as additional workshops, and public events.
The inaugural theme: Archives, Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico, invites researchers to engage with the word “archives” as concept, practice, and theory by bringing together some of the most important framings of historically inflected research. The theme contends with the material and theoretical importance of the archive in contemporary scholarship and research practices while opening a space to engage with contestation, archival reckoning, archival architecture, facilities, and accessibility, and quotidian interventions and forms of archival refusal.
At a time when Puerto Rican Studies is seeing a resurgence in the United States, this is an opportunity to examine the roots of the field as we also contemplate what lies ahead. Both archival studies and archival structures in the Puerto Rican context, can be contentious and precarious. Thinking about the promises, betrayals, and possibilities of the archive in material and theoretical contexts opens a space for us to consider questions such as: How do we engage with institutional archives that continue to uphold colonial fantasies of race and gender? What are the material and theoretical relations between archives, memory, and temporality (e.g. notions of past, present, future)? What do we gain from challenges to various prominent historical archival practices like reading “archives against the grain,” which challenge the dominant historical consciousness and praxis of European empires? How do we approach memory and cultural preservation in times of austerity and natural disasters? These questions, and others, will guide our discussions during this year-long seminar, where we will be considering different uses of the archive and explore how these spaces, collections, and practices can be transformed through a decolonial, feminist, and queer lens.
We invite applications from researchers and artists in all fields of study and disciplines, including creative writing and visual arts.
To learn more and apply visit: https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/opportunities/rooted-relational-research-associate