Trinity Professor Named Inaugural Fellow for Research Project on Puerto Rican Archives

A Trinity College faculty member has been named as a fellow for a new research project hosted by Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO).

Amanda J. Guzmán, assistant professor of anthropology and co-director of Trinity’s Center for Caribbean Studies, is one of 13 research associates for the inaugural year of CENTRO’s five-year Rooted + Relational initiative. The project 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.” According to CENTRO, “This year’s theme 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.”

Guzman’s research has been supported by the National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History.

Guzmán applies her collections experience and her object-based research approach to a teaching practice that privileges a more equitable, co-production of knowledge through accessible modelling of cultural work. In 2023, Guzmán curated cuestiones caribeñas/caribbean matters: an exhibition by Pablo Delano at the Austin Arts Center at Trinity and invited students in an associated January Term course into the behind-the-scenes process of exhibition design. In 2024, Guzmán contributed a co-authored book chapter, “Teaching Museum Curation and Cultural Equity by Design” to the Routledge edited volume, Pragmatic Imagination and the New Museum Anthropology.

Throughout the year, Guzman will meet weekly with the other fellows at CENTRO for seminars, workshops, and events. Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, professor of Latin American, Iberian, and Latino cultures at the CUNY Graduate Center, will be the CUNY faculty presider for the year, offering mentorship and support for the cohort. The fellowship will culminate in a symposium in Spring 2025 accompanied by an edited volume published by CENTRO Press.

Hunter College is a public university in New York City and is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York (CUNY). The “Rooted + Relational” initiative is supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.