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.

Fall 2011 Events Calendar can be accessed via (http://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu)
The link is located on the right. We look forward to seeing you at these events.

The Inter-University Program for Latino Research, is a consortium of
University based centers dedicated to the advancement of the Latino
intellectual presence in the United States. IUPLR works to expand the pool
of Latino scholars and leaders and increase the availability of
policy-relevant Latino-focused research. With headquarters at the University
of Notre Dame, and Washington DC, IUPLR work to strengthen the network of
centers and to enhance their institutional capacity. IUPLR objectives are to
promote comparative, interdisciplinary, and policy-focused research; develop
collaborative national programs that support Latino students and faculty in
higher education; established collaborative projects with scholars in the
arts, culture and the humanities; and to disseminate publications generated
by the IUPLR national network of scholars.

Centro at Hunter College, CUNY and the Dominican Studies Institute City College, CUNY are members.

See their website for information on conferences, grants and national news in Education and Latino Studies.
http://www.nd.edu/~iuplr

2011 PRSA Symposium & Business Meeting
Puerto Rican Studies for a New Century: Challenges, Prospects and Possibilities
• Edna Acosta-Belen (University at Albany, SUNY), • Juan Flores (New York University) and • Larry La Fountain-Stokes (University of Michigan), October 29, 2011, 10am–2pm, in Assembly Room 615W, at Hunter College (CUNY), 68th Street & Lexington Avenue, New York.

October 29, 2011, 10:00am to 2:00pm
Assembly Room 615W
Hunter College (CUNY)
68th Street & Lexington Avenue, New York City

Please click and visit the PRSA site: for additional information and the pre-registration form. Information is located under the Conference tab.

From the desk of

Ramona Hernández, Ph.D., Director, CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, Professor of Sociology, The City College of New York

I am pleased to share with you two significant news items, one is a first in the history of Dominicans in the United States, and the second is an exciting development with respect to the Conference on the Spanish Caribbean–and my hope that more of you will decide to join us in Santo Domingo for this Conference.

A SPECIAL ISSUE ON DOMINICAN STUDIES!

Last week, I received the most important printed volume that has crossed my desk in a long time: A special issue of the journal Camino Real devoted entirely to Dominican Studies. This is the FIRST time that a multidisciplinary academic journal has devoted an entire issue to the field. I had the honor of co-editing this volume, with my colleague Anthony Stevens-Acevedo, at the request of the publisher, Instituto Franklin of the Universidad de Alcalá, Spain, and its editor José Antonio Gurpegui, to whom we are especially grateful.

The authors selected for this volume include seasoned as well as up-and-coming scholars in the field:

Sarah Aponte provides a statistical analysis of the more than 700 doctoral dissertations published in the U.S. on Dominican-related topics since 1939; Dr. Daisy Cocco de Filippis writes about the history of the tertulias of Dominican women writers; Emilia María Durán Almarza provides a reading of Josefina Baez’s performance text “Dominicanish”; Ofelia García and Lesley Bartlettwrite about the notions of “trust” and “care” in a Dominican-run high school for newly arrived immigrant youth in Washington Heights; Sydney Hutchinsonexplores the musical influence of New York merengueros on merengue típico;Juleyka Lantingua-Williams interviews Pulitzer-prize winning writer Junot Diaz; Danny Méndez examines the racial and affective gaps in the New York memoirs of Pedro Henríquez Ureña;and Marisel Moreno writes about the Afro-Dominican identity of immigrant poets like Marianela Medrano and Sussy Santana.

The journal can be ordered by subscription from Instituto Franklin’s website:
http://www.institutofranklin.net/en/research/publications/revista-camino-real

CONFERENCE ON THE SPANISH CARIBBEAN
EXTENDED FROM TWO TO THREE DAYS,
JULY 25 -27

WE HOPE YOU WILL JOIN US!

Because of the unexpectedly large response and the quality of the submissions—close to 80 proposals were received in response to the Call for Papers—the Spanish Caribbean Conference Organizing Committee has extended the conference from two to three days, July 25 to 27. In addition, a second prestigious venue has been added for the second and third days, the Academia de la Historia Dominicana. (The opening day events and panels will be held at FUNGLODE headquarters.)

This is the first time that scholars from around the world will gather to consider and debate the proposition that the Spanish Caribbean deserves to be studied as a field in its own right. This is a bold proposition. We hope that as many of you as can will join us in Santo Domingo July 25-27 for an exciting and unprecented debate that will engage prominent academics from the U.S., the Spanish Caribbean, Europe, Latin America, and other parts of the world.

This conference is open to the public free of charge but registration is required in advance of the Conference. (Although registration may be possible at the door, advanced registration will facilitate entry at the conference sites.)