Rosario Ferré: A Feminist Voice of Transgression in the Literary Canon of Puerto Rico

This grant has been a great support in completing my research focused on the personal archives of the Puerto Rican writer Rosario Ferré (1938–2016). With this aim, I visited Ferré’s personal archives located at the University of Puerto Rico, the Firestone Library at Princeton University, and the Rare Book Collection of Columbia University. These collections are significantly important for my research since these institutions hold rich troves of personal correspondence, interviews, lectures, unpublished literary works, original manuscripts, and professional photographs taken over the course of Ferré’s life and career. As a result of this research, I presented the paper “Zona de Carga y Descarga: Cuerpo de desafíos y encuentros literarios” at The Eighth International Conference on Society, Culture and Politics in Latin America at the Instituto Iberoamericano at the University of Salamanca, Spain (June 28–July 1, 2016). Furthermore, I developed a collaborative project with my student Mackenzie Fraser (English Literature major and Spanish/Gender Studies double minor, 2017) that allowed us to present it at The International Conference: XIX Congreso Internacional de Literatura Hispánica in Buenos Aires, Argentina (March 8–10, 2017). This project has since led to the development of an article titled “Las Isabeles: (Des)construcción de género y sexualidad como génesis a la fragmentación del paternalismo en la literatura puertorriqueña,” accepted by the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Hunter College, CUNY) to be published in Revisiting Queer Puerto Rican Sexualities: Queer Futures, Reinventions, and Exclusions (2018), a special issue of CENTRO Journal. I am already working on two additional articles regarding the literary journal Zona de Carga y Descarga (1972– 1975), edited by Rosario Ferré and Olga Nolla (1938–2001), and on the influence of Ferré’s family and the Catalan cellist Pau Casals (1876–1973) on the development of a series of cultural projects of great renown during the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis