The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (CENTRO) is calling on artists to present research proposals for the Summer 2025 Artistic Research Residency Program.
Artists have been instrumental in shaping the Puerto Rican identity, untangling our daily experiences, and crafting possible futures. It is for that reason that we aim to provide an artistic residency in which the creative results are informed and inspired by research using materials from the CENTRO Library and Archives as inspiration. For this summer residency, we are seeking proposals that fall under our 2024-2025 annual theme: Archives: Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico. This call is open to all artistic disciplines.
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
Submission Guidelines:
The application form will ask you to provide the following:
- CV (maximum 3 pages)
- A digital portfolio (can be a link to your website or an online platform) or samples of your work.
- Proposal, which should include:
- Description of project
- Library and Archives collection(s) to be used
- Timeline of the residency
- Timeline of the final project (not covered by the residency)
Terms:
- This is a three month long residency and will start on May 15, 2025 and will end by August 15, 2025. The artist agrees to investigate in the Library and Archives of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies and its digital collections, with the intention of informing the development of their artistic project. The artist 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 artist to carry out their research and will offer preferential and personalized support.
- The artist agrees to coordinate with local artists and area residents for conversations, panels, interviews, or other types of interaction that extends their research outside the walls of the archive and traditional sources of information.
- The artist will share their findings of their research process at a midterm meeting scheduled by and with the CENTRO staff.
- At the end of the residency, the artist will publicly present the research process, an advance or the finished work and will participate in one or more panels coordinated with CENTRO.
- The selected artist will deliver a digital document with the documentation of their artistic research. The document must include a narrative of the important findings, documentation of the creative process and audiovisual material. Copies of this digital document will become part of the archives of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies.
- The artist has the option of presenting their work directly in the community and can also make use of some spaces available in CENTRO and Hunter College.
- The artists will receive a stipend of $5,000 ($2,500 at the beginning of the residency and $2,500 at the end) for research conducting to the creation of an artistic project.
- All project expenses must be covered by the amount awarded for the commission. This includes the fees of the artist, materials and equipment necessary for the execution of the work.
Grant Amount: $5,000
Residency Duration: May 15, 2025 - August 15, 2025
Deadline: March 1, 2025 at 11:59 pm.
Submissions must be received on or before the provided deadline.
About the Center for Puerto Rican Studies
The Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College, City University of New York, is a research institute dedicated to the study and interpretation of the Puerto Rican experience in the United States by producing and disseminating relevant interdisciplinary research and collecting, preserving, and providing access to archive and library resources that document their history and culture. CENTRO seeks to link scholarship with social action and political debates, and contribute to the enrichment of Puerto Rican studies.
CENTRO is dedicated to the comprehensive collection of data, graphic arts, and library and archival resources that document the history and legacy of Puerto Ricans in the United States, to the study of critical and relevant social issues and conditions affecting this culturally diverse nation, for the purpose of promoting effective community and public sector interventions, and supporting the intellectual and educational advancement of young scholars.
CENTRO's Puerto Rican Diaspora Archives contain more than 5,000 cubic feet of materials and include documents from artists, writers, politicians, activists, and other prominent community figures and organizations. The archives document the diversity of individuals and communities that reside in the city and have sought to focus their efforts on historically Puerto Rican enclaves such as the Lower East Side (Loisaida), East Harlem (El Barrio), the South Bronx, and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In addition, it houses the records of the Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States, which record the migration and working conditions of Puerto Ricans from the early 1930s until the closing of their offices in the mid-1990s, and document the formation of Puerto Rican communities in neighborhoods throughout the Northeast, Chicago, and Florida, with a special concentration in New York City.
About Hunter College
Located in the heart of Manhattan, Hunter is the largest college in the City University of New York (CUNY) system. Founded in 1870, it is also one of the oldest public colleges in the country and famous for a student body that is as diverse as the city itself. Most Hunter students are the first in their families to attend college and many go on to top professional and graduate programs, winning Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships, Mellon fellowships, National Institutes of Health grants, and other competitive honors. More than 23,000 students currently attend Hunter, pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in more than 170 areas of study. The 1,700 full- and part-time members of Hunter’s faculty are unparalleled. They receive prestigious national grants, contribute to the world's leading academic journals, and play major roles in cutting-edge research. They are fighting cancer, formulating public policy, expanding our culture, enhancing technology, and more.
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.
About The Center for Puerto Rican Studies:
The CENTER for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College, City University of New York, is a research institute dedicated to the study and interpretation of the Puerto Rican experience in the United States by producing and disseminating relevant interdisciplinary research and collecting, preserving, and providing access to archive and library resources that document their history and culture. CENTRO seeks to link scholarship with social action and political debates, and contribute to the enrichment of Puerto Rican studies.
CENTRO is dedicated to the comprehensive collection of data, graphic arts, and library and archival resources that document the history and legacy of Puerto Ricans in the United States, to the study of critical and relevant social issues and conditions affecting this culturally diverse nation. for the purpose of promoting effective community and public sector interventions, and supporting the intellectual and educational advancement of young scholars.
CENTRO's Puerto Rican Diaspora Archives contain more than 5,000 cubic feet of materials and include documents from fellows, writers, politicians, activists, and other prominent community figures and organizations. The archives document the diversity of individuals and communities that reside in the city and have sought to focus their efforts on historically Puerto Rican enclaves such as the Lower East Side (Loisaida), East Harlem (El Barrio), the South Bronx, and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In addition, it houses the records of the Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States, which record the migration and working conditions of Puerto Ricans from the early 1930s until the closing of their offices in the mid-1990s. and document the formation of Puerto Rican communities in neighborhoods throughout the Northeast, Chicago, and Florida, with a special concentration in New York City.
About Hunter College
Located in the heart of Manhattan, Hunter is the largest college in the City University of New York (CUNY) system. Founded in 1870, it is also one of the oldest public colleges in the country and famous for a student body that is as diverse as the city itself. Most Hunter students are the first in their families to attend college and many go on to top professional and graduate programs, winning Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships, Mellon fellowships, National Institutes of Health grants, and other competitive honors. More than 23,000 students currently attend Hunter, pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in more than 170 areas of study. The 1,700 full- and part-time members of Hunter’s faculty are unparalleled. They receive prestigious national grants, contribute to the world's leading academic journals, and play major roles in cutting-edge research. They are fighting cancer, formulating public policy, expanding our culture, enhancing technology, and more.
Description: CENTRO Press and Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative jointly call for applications for the Diasporican Archives Graduate Research Fellowship. We will award up to two fellowships of $3,000 each to two graduate students currently enrolled at CUNY. The awardees will conduct research at CENTRO’s Archives to edit a chapbook with original research and unpublished archival materials. Fellows will have the support of an ad hoc group of advisors composed of members of both CENTRO and Lost and Found. Successful chapbooks will be co-published as part of CENTRO Press’ Diasporican Archives Chapbook Series and Lost and Found.
Application Deadline: March 21, 2025
Goals: To incentivize publication of literary materials from CENTRO’s Archive with a rigorous academic framing; to keep CENTRO’s archive alive and dynamic; to make diasporic Puerto Rican literature easily available to students, teachers, professors, researchers, and readers everywhere.
Funding Amount: $3,000 (+ Publication costs, if applicable), disbursed in two installments.
Duration of fellowship: April to September 2025 (the Archives will be closed in July)
Eligibility: This fellowship is restricted to Masters and Doctoral students currently enrolled at a CUNY institution and who will continue to be enrolled for the duration of the fellowship.
Conditions:
- The proposed project should focus on materials held at CENTRO’s Archives. We are looking specifically for students interested in researching materials from the following collections:
- Jesús Colón Papers
- Clara Colón Papers
- Erasmo Vando Rodríguez Papers
- Emelí Vélez de Vando Papers
- Graciany Archilla Miranda Papers
- Juan Flores Papers,
- Miguel Algarín Papers
- Juan Avilés Collection,
- Ana Gloria San Antonio Papers,
- Victor Fernández Fragoso Papers,
- Elba Cabrera Papers,
- Juan González Papers
- Blase Camacho Souza Papers
Projects focusing on other collections will be considered but will need prior approval before submitting the application. If you wish to propose work with a different collection, please reach out to the Editor at centrops@hunter.cuny.edu
- Fellows must commit to a minimum of 10 visits to the Archives from April-September 2025.
- At the end of the summer, the awardees must submit a report with the findings of the research conducted with the support of the fellowship.
- The awardees must submit to the advisors and Editors a final version of the chapbook proposal by the end of October 2025.
- Fellows who fail to meet the minimum of visits to the archive and don’t submit a successful proposal will have to return the award.
- CENTRO Press and Lost and Found do not commit to publishing the work if the quality of the research and final proposal do not meet the Press’ standards. The joint Editorial team will carefully consider the chapbook proposal and evaluate the merits and viability of the project together with the awardees’ fellowship advisors.
Deliverables:
- A chapbook proposal. CENTRO Press and Lost and Found commit to responding to the awardee within one month of submission, after which period, if the proposal is not accepted, the awardee can submit it to other presses.
- If the chapbook proposal resulting from the summer research is accepted, a chapbook with the archival materials worked with during the time of the fellowship will be edited and published as part of CENTRO’s Diasporican Archives Chapbook series and will also be part of the Lost and Found Catalog.
Application Process: Applicants must apply using the following link. Applications will not be accepted by email. The application consists of: 1. a project description specifying the author or topic of research and sketching out the intended publication project, including a brief paragraph justifying the merits of the project; 2. a work plan for the time spent in person at the archive; 3. and a CV.
Applicants will be notified of the results by mid-April.
For any questions, you can write to the Editor at centrops@hunter.cuny.edu
About the Center for Puerto Rican Studies
The Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College, City University of New York, is a research institute dedicated to the study and interpretation of the Puerto Rican experience in the United States by producing and disseminating relevant interdisciplinary research and collecting, preserving, and providing access to archive and library resources that document their history and culture. CENTRO seeks to link scholarship with social action and political debates, and contribute to the enrichment of Puerto Rican studies.
CENTRO is dedicated to the comprehensive collection of data, graphic arts, and library and archival resources that document the history and legacy of Puerto Ricans in the United States, to the study of critical and relevant social issues and conditions affecting this culturally diverse nation, for the purpose of promoting effective community and public sector interventions, and supporting the intellectual and educational advancement of young scholars.
CENTRO's Puerto Rican Diaspora Archives contain more than 5,000 cubic feet of materials and include documents from artists, writers, politicians, activists, and other prominent community figures and organizations. The archives document the diversity of individuals and communities that reside in the city and have sought to focus their efforts on historically Puerto Rican enclaves such as the Lower East Side (Loisaida), East Harlem (El Barrio), the South Bronx, and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In addition, it houses the records of the Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States, which record the migration and working conditions of Puerto Ricans from the early 1930s until the closing of their offices in the mid-1990s, and document the formation of Puerto Rican communities in neighborhoods throughout the Northeast, Chicago, and Florida, with a special concentration in New York City.
About Hunter College
Located in the heart of Manhattan, Hunter is the largest college in the City University of New York (CUNY) system. Founded in 1870, it is also one of the oldest public colleges in the country and famous for a student body that is as diverse as the city itself. Most Hunter students are the first in their families to attend college and many go on to top professional and graduate programs, winning Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships, Mellon fellowships, National Institutes of Health grants, and other competitive honors. More than 23,000 students currently attend Hunter, pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in more than 170 areas of study. The 1,700 full- and part-time members of Hunter’s faculty are unparalleled. They receive prestigious national grants, contribute to the world's leading academic journals, and play major roles in cutting-edge research. They are fighting cancer, formulating public policy, expanding our culture, enhancing technology, and more.