Puerto Rican Studies for a New Century Symposium October 29, 2011
Dear Colleagues,
The Puerto Rican Studies Association with the support of the CUNY Latino Faculty Initiative will be hosting this conference/dialogue at Hunter College. Please encourage your colleagues to attend the event. I anticipate that approximately 75 to 100 guests will attend. I look forward to seeing you there. The event is free and open to the public but we do ask that guests pre-register by October 24th to allow us to plan for the event.
best,
Arlene Torres, Director of Chancellor’s Latino Faculty Initiative
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Puerto Rican Studies for a New Century:
Challenges, Prospects and Possibilities
October 29, 2011, 10:00am to 2:00pm
Assembly Room 615W
Hunter College (CUNY)
68th Street & Lexington Avenue, New York City
“We are particularly fortunate in having as featured speakers three of the most uncommonly capable and distinguished scholars in our field, each of whom comes exceptionally well-equipped, thoughtfully and perceptively to address, assess and critically discuss the most compelling of the challenges, prospects, and possibilities lie before us in the 21st century.
A Puerto Rican studies pioneer, one of the PRSA’s former Presidents and a member of its original founding group, Edna Acosta-Belén is Distinguished Professor of Latin American, Caribbean, U.S. Latino and Woman’s Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY, where she has long served as Director of its Center for Latino, Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Co-founder and editor of theLatin(a) Research Review, co-editor of the Latinos: Exploring Diversity and Change series of books by Lynn Rienner Publishers, Edna is also the author, among other works, of Puerto Ricans in the United States: A Contemporary Portrait (with Carlos Santiago), and (with Christine Bose) Researching Women in Latin America and the Caribbean. Long a major and continuing contributor to the growth and on-going development of our field, she brings a wealth of accumulated knowledge and experience to our symposium’s central subject.
A keen and sagacious student of popular, diaspora, and Afro-Latino cultures and no less a critically influential and seminal scholarly figure in Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Juan Flores is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis in the Latino Studies Division of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Winner of the prestigious international Casa de Las Americas Prize for Insularismo e ideología burguesa (1980), he was also the recipient, in 2009, of its Premio Extraordinario de Estudios sobre los Latinos en Estados Unidosfor his collection Bugalú y otros guisos: ensayos sobre culturas Latinas en Estados Unidos. A skilled translator as well as cultural historian, whose efforts have given us an excellent English version of Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s El entierro de Cortijo, the outstanding body of his own equally notable works of critical and theoretical contribution and scholarly achievement also includes the now canonic Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity (1980), From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latin Identity (2000), A Companion to Latino Studies (2007),The Diaspora Strikes Back (2009) and, with Miriam Jiménez Román, the recently published Afro-Latin@ Reader.
One among the more prominent and persuasive voices of a comparatively younger emerging generation of notable scholars committed to the opening up to critical examination new and hitherto too little explored dimensions of scholarly research in Puerto Rican Studies, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Writer, poet, playwright, performer, and a recipient of the Pregones Asunción Playwrights Award, his scholarly interests extend across the wider Hispanic Caribbean and its multinational diaspora, with a particular emphasis and concentration on queer literary and cultural studies and related issues of race and gender . He has served on the Board of Directors of the CUNY Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, the Modern Language Association’s Committee on the Literatures of People of Color of the United States and Canada, as well as on the Executive Committee of its Puerto Rican Literature and Culture Discussion Group. The author of several perceptively informative articles on the cultural representations of homosexuality, his recently published Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora, a finalist in PRSA’s first Book Award competition, brings new perception, a notably original and critically important contribution to the daily gathering centrality of a topic still all too-insufficiently explored and of continuing on-going discussion and significance.”
(Excerpt from the letter posted by Dr. Roberto Marquez, President of PRSA)
http://www.puertoricanstudies.org/
IMPORTANT NOTICE: You should pre-register for this event to help us organize it. To pre-register and pay online for the lunch, or to indicate that you will not have lunch at the event, please visit the PRSA website, go to the tab conferences and click on the 2011 PRSA symposium for a link to Event Brite.
