Dr. Alejandro Vélez Santiago Departamento de Ciencias Matemáticas “A class of nonlinear boundary value problems on general domains”
The main goal of this research proposal is to investigate the solvability and global regularity theory for a general class of nonlinear elliptic problems with various boundary conditions, on a wide class of domains which include non-smooth and fractal domains. The two main branches consist of the following: first, existence, nonexistence, multiplicity, and global regularity theory for nonlinear boundary value problems when the exponent is constant, and secondly, the solvability and global regularity theory for nonlinear differential equations with variable exponents on various domains.
Dra. Jacqueline Girón Alvarado Departamento de Estudios Hispánicos
“Los universos de René Marqués: erudito, literato, ideólogo y lector”
En el 2018 celebraremos el centenario del natalicio del escritor puertorriqueño René Marqués. El custodio de su biblioteca personal, el doctor José M. Lacomba, nos ha otorgado acceso a ésta y a todos los documentos del escritor con el fin de organizarlos y digitalizarlos. La biblioteca no solo alberga el quehacer artístico de René Marqués en los diferentes géneros, sino que cuenta con, al menos, ocho obras de teatro inéditas, cartas y apuntes, entre otros valiosos recursos, como sus anotaciones y comentarios de escritores clásicos y coetáneos del país y del exterior. La descarga que solicitamos nos permitiría organizar y digitalizar estos documentos y los manuscritos contenidos en 14 archivos grandes. Tener y hacer accesibles al público la biblioteca personal de este escritor es como poseer una máquina del tiempo en la que podemos trasladarnos al pasado, a la historia y la vivencia de toda una generación de puertorriqueños. Este invalorable legado necesita ser revisado, catalogado, estudiando, revalorizado, categorizado, divulgado y aprovechado al máximo para la educación de ésta y las futuras generaciones de estudiosos y aficionados a la literatura, la historia y la cultura puertorriqueñas y caribeñas.
Dr. Melvin González Rivera Departamento de Estudios Hispánicos
“Redacción y revisión de tres capítulos del libro Sintaxis y semántica del español”
La descarga académica tendrá como objetivo la redacción y revisión de tres capítulos del libro “Sintaxis y semántica del español”, en coautoría con el doctor Sandro Sessarego (University of Texas, Austin), y que será publicado por la editorial (Reino Unido) en 2018. La fecha de entrega del manuscrito final es el 1 de noviembre de 2018. El libro tiene siete capítulos;
Tema 1. La sintaxis
Tema 2. La semántica
Tema 3. Sintagmas y oraciones
Tema 4. Semántica y léxico
Tema 5. Tiempo, aspecto y modalidad
Tema 6. Cuantificación
Tema 7. La periferia izquierda
Durante el periodo de esta descarga, escribiré y revisaré los capítulos 3, 4 y 5 del libro, correspondientes a los temas Semántica y léxico, Tiempo, aspecto y modalidad, y Cuantificación. Cada capítulo del libro tiene al final una sección de ejercicios. Estos serán desarrollados también.
Dr. Mark Jury Departamento de Física “Caribbean and African climate variability”
This Project is focused on mesoscale climate variability of Caribbean and African regions using existing operatinal datasets to understand processes and improve analysis and forecasts. The specific themes include: a) Antilles Island weather and climate, b) hydrology, vegetation and surface fluxes, c) air pollution meteorology and climate change, d) coastal and upper ocean variability, and d) understanding Caribbean and African floods, drought and socio-economic impacts. The themes underpin research by the project leader and meteorology students at UPRM.
Dr. Jeffrey Herlihy Departamento de Humanidades “Cuba in Hemingway”
This project offers a comprehensive analysis of how Cuban culture and language influenced Ernest Hemingway’s literature, biography, and aesthetic sensibility. “Aquí en la casa,” he wrote in 1950 from his home outside Havana, “hablamos español siempre.” The project aims to nuance the English-centric perspectives on Hemingway, using the letters he wrote in Spanish and reports from Spanish-language literary criticism bases of analysis. The correspondence (over 80 letters) has not been published or translated, and is—like much of the Spanish-language criticism of Hemingway’s work—virtually unknown to literary scholars based in the US. Upon discussing the project with Suzanne del Gizzo, editor of The Hemingway Review, I was invited to expand an article into a guest-edited instalment of The Hemingway Review. During a course release this spring, I will prepare revise this article, entitled “Cuba in Hemingway” for The Hemingway Review, work on a guest-edited instalment of the same journal, and prepare a proposal to submit to presses that expands the argument from the article and journal instalment into a monograph. The project will disseminate new material about Hemingway in Cuba and the role of the Spanish language in his literature; “Cuba in Hemingway” will also document the mutually influential and complementary cultural ties between the US and Cuba, examining Hemingway’s experience as a precursor to multicultural notions of citizenship.
Dra. Ana Kothe Departamento de Humanidades “Unruly Catholic Women Writers: Reflections on the Future of Women in the Catholic Church: Editing, Part 1”
With my co-editors and colleages Dr. Jeana DelRosso, Professor of English and Director of the Morrissy Honors Programs at Notre Dame of Maryland University, and Dr. Leigh Eicke, former Assistant Professor of English at Grand Valley State University and freelance writer, I am proposing a book-length collection of creative pieces on women and Roman Catholicism. This project is tentatively titled, Unruly Catholic Women Witers: Reflections on the Future of Women in the Catholic Church. This Project will constitute the fourth book in my Catholic Women Writers series.
My previous anthologies have covered varied critical and creative perspectives on and by both canonical and lesser-known Catholic women writers, all focusing on unruliness in what is commonly thought of as a restrictive site of writing for women: Catholicism.
Following the same spirit of inquiry regarding the extent to which the Roman Catholic Church enables or restricts female unruliness, I now seek to create another volumen of creative pieces-short stories, poems, personal essays-on the topic of the future of women in the Roman Catholic church.
Dr. Christopher Power Departamento de Humanidades “Chronicle of an Uncanny other Puerto Rico”
La noche oscura del Niño Aviles (1984) by the Puerto Rican novelist Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá begins with an uncanny body: the title’s reference to Jose Campeche’s 1808 painting of a limbless child, his melancholic, suffering gaze transfixing the viewer. In the novel-the first of a tetralogy entitled Chronicle of New Venice– and its sequels, the child becomes a messianic figure and the eventual founder of Nueva Venecia, a fabulous utopian city built in the swamps and canals around San Juan and a refuge for maroons, rebels and outcast. Like the disturbing painting, the novel’s fabulations upset readerly expectations and project an uncanny alternate history, a phantasmagorical transfiguration of what never happened but which subsists in the historical unconscious as a nightmare. “Nueva Venecia became the dark reverso of our peaceful and respectable colonial history,” its invented historian Alejandro Cadalso summarizes. The novel’s conflictual styles pit a hyperbolic baroque (like its excessive use of the polysyndeton and profusion of demostratives) against anachronistic slang from the twentieth century, contamination the historical authority of colonial texts like those of Ledrú or Abbad y Lasierra with the unexpected and uncanny intrusion of the future. Finally the author has written of his creation itself as a product of hypergraphia-an uncanny automatism-whose “existence has left even me perplexed.” This intervention reads the novel’s uncanny bodies, uncanny fabulations, uncanny styles, and its uncanny coming to be as an emblem of Puerto Rico’s uncanny modernity. My project will culminate in a scholarly essay for eventual submission for publication to an academic journal dedicated to literary studies.
Dra. Lissette Rolón Collazo Departamento de Humanidades “Otras memorias: cuerpos en fuga resisten”
Otras memorias:cuerpos en fuga resisten se propone recuperar las memorias de subjetividades marginadas por ser diferentes a la heterosexualidad a partir de un estudio de caso: el de Florencio/Teresa Pla Messeguer alias La Pastora, Tereso o Durriti. Tereso, como este proyecto escoge llamarle para reconocer su intersexualidad, se dedica al pastoreo antes de unirse al movimiento maqui de resistencia a la dictadura franquista. Después de militar y participar activamente en esa forma de guerrilla fue atrapadx y encarceladx (primero en una cárcel de mujeres y luego en una de hombres). Su genitalia ambigua supuso un reto a la imposición del binario de los dos sexos, toda vez que su oposición a la dictadura lx convirtió en unx enemigx público por partida doble.
Otras memorias: cuerpos en fuga resisten analizará las representaciones literarias e históricas de Tereso en contrapunto con un análisis de cómo ciertos saberes -la medicina, la sicología y el derecho, entre otros- se han enfrentado a la diversidad de los cuerpos y de las ideas desde el 1930 a esta parte. De este modo, esta investigación rescatará su memoria y su voz silenciada en sintonía con la Ley para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica en España.
Dr. Eric Lamore Departamento de Inglés “Textual Failure and Early Black Atlantic Literature”
If I am awarded a research release for the Fall 2017 semester, I will continue to produce peer-reviewed scholarship on the literatura related or written by individuals of African descent that was first published before 1800. Specifically, I will write about why Briton Hammon’s Narrative (1760), Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked and Traffick of the Commerce of the Human Species (the authorized 1787 and 1791 editions) and John Marrant’s Journal (1790) were “textual failure [s]” (Books).
Most of my peer-reviewed publications have studied the best-selling-autobiographical narratives from the early black Atlantic literary canon. At this point, I wish to study the opposite phenomenon: to interrogate the reasons why some early black Atlantic literary texts were commercial and political failures. In one part of this Project, I will analyze why Hammon’s narrative and Marrant’s journal did not continue to appear in print after the first editions of these texts. In another part of the project, I will document the revisions Cugoano made to his condensed 1791 version of Thoughts to determine how the failure of his 1787 edition Thoughts shaped his revision process and his choice to address only the “Sons of Africa” in the 1791 edition. This Project aims to contribute new knowledge on the publishing histories of these texts as well as the cultural, ideological, and political forces that determined whether or not a text from the early black Atlantic literary canon was commercially and politically successful.
Dra. Tania del Mar López Marrero Departamento de Ciencias Sociales y Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios del Litoral “Desastres y memoria social en Puerto Rico”
En esta investigación se explora la aplicación del concepto de memoria social en estudios de desastres y como un elemento que puede ayudar a aumentar la resiliencia de individuos que viven en lugares expuestos a amenazas naturales. A partir de ello, y utilizando el caso de Puerto Rico, se desarrolla el proyecto “Desastres y memoria en Puerto Rico”. En el mismo se presentan las tendencias de ocurrencia de desastres en la isla a partir del año 1867; año en el cual ocurrieron tres desastres – el Huracán San Narciso, un terremoto y un tsunami. Se incluye, además, descripciones de diversos desastres históricos en Puerto Rico como una manera de mantener viva su memoria, junto con relatos de desastres más recientes como es el caso del Huracán María. En la charla se presenta el proyecto, además de ilustrar el envolvimiento de estudiantes subgraduados en su desarrollo y la labor creativa relacionada al mismo.
