Puerto Rican studies
Amanda J. Guzmán, assistant professor of anthropology and co-director of Trinity’s Center for Caribbean Studies, has been named as a fellow for a new research project hosted by Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO).
Guzmán is one of 13 research associates for the inaugural year of CENTRO’s five-year Rooted + Relational initiative—supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation—that seeks to foster a dynamic intersection between academia, arts, culture, and community-driven research.
The theme for the first year of Rooted + Relational is “Archives, Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico,” which, according to CENTRO, “aims to reinvigorate discourses and debates in Puerto Rican studies through a sustained engagement with material, affective, and public archives.”
Guzmán specializes in museum anthropology, focusing on the history of collecting and exhibiting Puerto Rico. As a fellow, Guzmán plans to develop several writing projects, including a book proposal tentatively titled From Island to Museum: Materializing Puerto Rican Object Itineraries. This forthcoming manuscript employs a comparative approach toward diverse institutional assemblages to trace the history of North American museum collecting in and representation of Puerto Rico.
Guzmán also will conduct museum collection visits and archival research at several New York cultural institutions related to a second project on the history of Puerto Rican exhibition practice. She most looks forward to the opportunity to write within a community of Puerto Rican scholars and artists and to complicate her preexisting disciplinary conceptions of what an archive is and can be.
“Through the analysis of object collections and associated archival records, my work reassembles not only individual acquisition narratives but also the larger contexts of the rise of museums and the field of anthropology,” Guzmán said. “Museum objects recover generations of silenced local actors and agency amidst a contemporary climate of material uncertainty and historical disrepair.”
Photo by Vuk Dragojevic/Courtesy of Amanda Guzmán
