CLAS Launches Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration
The Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration
For the next three years, the Center for Latin American Studies will be collaborating with sister institutions in Puerto Rico to help them preserve and make accessible digitally important archival collections and periodical publications.
The Collaboration began in September 2021 and involved the Coleccion Puertorriqueña of the University of Puerto Rico Library, its Digital Collections held at the Coleccion Digital Puertorriqueña and the General Archive and National Library of the government's Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña.
These collections are valuable resources for researchers, including faculty based at Rutgers.
Rutgers will provide student workers and technical assistance to these institutions as they organize, microfilm and digitize important collections. Puerto Rico's extended economic crisis, which began in 2005 and has not abated, has resulted in the loss of resources for these critical cultural institutions.
In the next months this project will highlight:
- Emerging research projects that utilize materials from these institutions
- The addition of new archives and components to this collaboration
- On-site visits by Rutgers faculty and graduate students.
- Local and Rutgers supported staff working in microfilming, indexing and scanning
For More information visit the Project Page for updates.
CLAS Launches Colombia Working Group
As a result of growing interest among faculty and graduate students the Center for Latin American Studies is inaugurating a working group on Colombia. Coordinated by Graduate Student Javier González Cortés (History Ph.D. program), the working group will organize events, faculty discussions, and research collaborations. During the last fifteen years the number of Colombian Americans in New Jersey has grown, as well as their presence at Rutgers. Rutgers graduate programs have also been recruiting a growing number of students from Colombia, as well as students drawn from the Columbian Latinx community. These students will join about half a dozen faculty and some staff as well who share an interest in Colombia's history and current events.
See the CLAS Colombia Working Group page for updates and resources.
Graduate Student Publication
Jian Ren, an advanced graduate student in the Latin American History Ph.D. Program, recently published "REPENSAR LA DIPLOMACIA CULTURAL DESDE LA PERSPECTIVA CHINA: GUILLERMO DEL PEDREGAL Y LA IMAGEN DEL LIDERAZGO CHINO SOBRE CHILE (1959-1975)" in the journal INTUS-LEGERE HISTORIA (15:1 2021). Jian is working on a dissertation on relations between the Chinese government and various Latin American countries between the 1950s and 1970s.
New CLAS Executive Committee Members
Our Executive Committee will have new members this year: Professors Ulla Berg, Carlos Decena, Shantee Rosado and Isaias Rojas-Perez. They will join Laura Cuesta and Andrea Marson in providing advice for the CLAS.
New Faculty: Professor Nicole Burrows
Professor Burrows recently joined the History Department in SAS New Brunswick. She earned her Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center with a focus on Latin American and Caribbean History and African Diaspora Studies.
Her scholarship and teaching is in modern Caribbean and African-American history. Her research explores social justice movements, comparative histories of racialization and colonialism, Black Internationalism, and the politics of solidarity.
Her current book project, Seeds of Solidarity: African-Indian Relations and the 1935 Labor Rebellions in British Guiana, explores the historical possibility of a movement forged by those at the edges of empire in the midst of economic, political, and environmental crises. Three goals guides this project: to center plantation workers and the 1930s in the development of modern politics in the Caribbean; to expand the framework of “overlapping diasporas;” and, by theorizing about the potential basis for solidarity amidst profound structures of difference in order to counter generations of hegemonic narratives that center racial conflict.