Amanda J. Guzmán

Amanda J. Guzmán is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology and the co-director of the Center for Caribbean Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She specializes in museum anthropology focusing on the history of collecting and exhibiting Puerto Rico. Her research has been supported by the National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History. In 2024, she contributed a co-authored book chapter, “Teaching Museum Curation and Cultural Equity by Design” to the Routledge edited volume, Pragmatic Imagination and the New Museum Anthropology. Guzmán plans to develop several writing projects including a book proposal tentatively titled, From Island to Museum: Materializing Puerto Rican Object Itineraries. This manuscript employs a comparative approach towards diverse institutional assemblages to trace the history of North American museum collecting in and representation of Puerto Rico. Through the analysis of object collections and associated archival records, the work reassembles not only individual acquisition narratives but also the larger contexts of the rise of museums and the field of anthropology. Museum objects recover generations of silenced local actors and agency amidst a contemporary climate of material uncertainty and historical disrepair.