The Center for Puerto Rican Studies invites 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 and will be required to attend weekly seminar meetings, as well as additional workshops, and public events. 

Inaugural Theme (2024-2025) 
Archives, Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico 

The CENTRO Library & Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora is the only archival repository in the United States committed to documenting Puerto Rican communities in the United States. From this standpoint, we are uniquely positioned to invite scholars to reflect on how archives, archival theory, and practice allow us to reframe the present past of Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican communities as well as help us imagine and build Boricua futures.

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. 

Possible Topics:

• Archival Silences
• Memory and preservation
• Archives and Affect
• Embodiment 
• Afro-Boricua archives 
• Feminist Archives and archival practices
• Queer Archives
• Community Archives
• Family Archives
• Oral Histories
• Archiving performance
• Archives and Accessibility
• Archiving through disaster
• Tropical Archives 
• Born digital archives
• Archiving social media
• Information/Right to Information (FOIA and other types of access to public information)
• Archives and Accountability
• Processing and new archival technologies
• Metadata and Algorithms
• Archival Engineering and Structures

We invite applications from researchers and artists in all fields of study and disciplines, including creative writing and visual arts. 

Qualifications and How to Apply

Hybrid/Remote Fellows:

• Open to researchers working on the annual theme who are unable to relocate to New York City for the duration of the fellowship year. 
• PhD is not required, but fellows must have extensive background in Puerto Rican Studies.

Artists:

• Must be in residence at CENTRO for the 2024-2025 academic year
  

Independent Researcher:

• Must be in residence at CENTRO for the 2024-2025 academic year
• PhD is not required

Dissertation Fellow:

• Must be ABD in a related discipline by July 1, 2024 
• Must be in residence at CENTRO for the 2024-2025 academic year
• One of the 3 reference letters must come from the dissertation advisor

All applicants must submit the following through the application form:

• Cover letter describing related qualifications, experience, and proposed research activities.
• Current CV
• Writing sample related to the position (20-25 double spaced pages) or artist/media portfolio
• One page course proposal
• Contact information for 3 professional references.

Upload all documents as ONE single .pdf file

Deadline to apply: Jul 12, 2024 at 11:59pm ET

COMPENSATION

• Hybrid/Remote Fellows: $25,000
• Artists: $75,000 
• Independent Researchers: $75,000
• Dissertation Fellows: $50,000

If you have any questions about these positions, please email programs@centropr.app