“Listening to Puerto Rico” grows from the award-winning public humanities project, “Mi María: Puerto Rico after the Hurricane,” which included over 100 undergraduate students from UPRM recording oral histories about Hurricane María and its aftermath.
A team of researchers at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez has been awarded a $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities through the program Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan (SHARP). UPRM faculty received this award for the digital humanities project, “Listening to Puerto Rico: The Promise of Oral History On-Campus and Beyond.”
This award brings together three campus programs—the Department of English, General Library, and Film Certificate—to create a digital and physical Oral History Lab. The Lab is a multidisciplinary space dedicated to recording and sharing stories about Puerto Rico, focusing on the issues that the archipelago has faced in recent years. Dissemination of these stories will be through digital archiving, exhibition, and documentary films.
The Lab, the first of its kind in Puerto Rico, will be located at the General Library and is designed to be an active unit on campus that partners with STEM-focused disciplines to gather community-based research and to collaborate with community organizations, including mutual aid groups and citizen scientist projects.
An important aspect of this project is the creation of new oral history and documentary filmmaking courses that will be offered online by the English Department and the Film Certificate starting in the January 2022 semester, all of which are open to students at any UPR campus and the general public.
Ricia Anne Chansky, professor in the English Department, is the project director working with co-directors Jaquelina Álvarez of the General Library and Mary Leonard, Director of the Film Certificate. The leadership team is joined by collaborators Marci Denesiuk, a Canadian creative writer; librarians José Morales Benítez and Grisell Rodríguez; and award-winning Puerto Rican, Guillermo Gómez Álvarez and Raisa Bonnet Ocasio. In addition, audiovisual archivist, Caroline Gil, will support the project on issues related to digital curation and preservation.
“The American Rescue Plan recognizes that the cultural and educational sectors are essential components of the United States economy and civic life, vital to the health and resilience of American communities,” said NEH Acting Chairman Adam Wolfson. “These new grants will provide a lifeline to the country’s colleges and universities, museums, libraries, archives, historical sites and societies, save thousands of jobs in the humanities placed at risk by the pandemic, and help bring economic recovery to cultural and educational institutions and those they serve.”
On this occasion, NEH awarded more than 24 million dollars through SHARP and announced that, of the 937 eligible applications that were submitted for this award, only 292 humanities projects were funded across the country. The UPRM project is one of three funded in Puerto Rico and one of the few that were funded for the full $500,000.
