Rooted + Relational Summer 2025 Research Fellowship Open Call
The Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) invites applications from scholars, writers, and faculty for the 2025 Rooted and Relational Summer Research Fellowships. The fellowship tenure is three months during the summer of 2025 (June-August 2025) and proposals should be aligned with our annual theme, Archives: Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico and should explicitly engage with CENTRO’s available archival collections. For this round, we will be awarding two summer research fellowships of $5,000 each. For one of these fellowships, priority will be given to researchers interested in working with the Jesús Colón Papers. The other fellowship is open to any area of study or collection housed at the CENTRO Library & Archives.
Theme description: Archives: Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico
The CENTRO library and archive 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 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
Eligibility:
This call requires that fellows be over 21 years of age and can be faculty, graduate students, or independent scholars. The fellow must work in the field of Puerto Rican Studies and should be able to work at the CENTRO Library & Archives location (2180 3rd Ave, 1st Floor, Rm. 120 New York, NY 10035) during weekdays between June 1st and August 31st 2025 for a minimum of 10 days within the three month tenure of the summer fellowship.
Submission Guidelines:
The application form will ask you to provide the following:
- CV (maximum 3 pages)
- Proposal:
- Project Description (approx 500-1000 words)
- Collection(s) to be used (approx 250-500 words)
- Overall Timeline of your final project (approx 250 words)
- Timeline of the fellowship residency (month/dates you plan to visit)
Terms:
- This is a three month long residency and will start on June 1st and will end by August 31st. The fellow agrees to conduct research at the Library and Archives of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, with the intention of informing the development of their research project.The fellow must register at least 10 visits to the Library and Archives as part of the residency.
- The Center for Puerto Rican Studies will provide a work space for the fellows to carry out their research and will offer personalized support.
- At the end of the residency, the fellows will share their works-in-progress at a CENTRO event or panel organized by CENTRO (date to be announced in fall 2025).
- The fellows will receive an amount of $5,000 ($2,500 at the start of the residency and $2,500 after completing the full number of visits to the CENTRO Library & Archives).
- CENTRO will not be able to provide lodging or meals during the research residency.
Sending the application implies acceptance of all the conditions established in this call.
Complete the Application Form HERE.
Grant Amount: $5,000
Deadline: March 1, 2025 at 11:59 pm.
Submissions must be received on or before the provided deadline.