Kellogg faculty fellow Marisel Moreno has won a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, which was announced by the organization on Jan. 14. She is one of four faculty members in the College of Arts & Letters and one of 78 scholars nationwide to win an NEH fellowship.
In her NEH project Moreno, a professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, is seeking to advance understanding of the cultural impact of Hurricane Maria.
“As a Puerto Rican born and raised in the archipelago but who has been living stateside for decades, I am one of the millions of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora who witnessed, from afar, the destruction of our homeland,” Moreno said, referring to the hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico in Sept. 2017. “There were limited ways to help immediately following the hurricane, but in spring 2018 a unique opportunity arose to create awareness about Puerto Rico and the impact of the storm.”
In partnership with the University of Michigan, Moreno, whose area of expertise is US Latinx literature, and Kellogg faculty fellow Tom Anderson, led and co-produced an online course and created the multimedia project “Listening to Puerto Rico,” in which they interviewed Puerto Ricans about the immediate impact of the Category 4 hurricane’s destruction.
Deriving inspiration from those interviews, Moreno is now focusing on her NEH-supported project, tentatively titled “Eye of the Storm: Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rican Cultural Production.” The intended book will focus on Puerto Rican literary and cultural expressions post-Maria, and Moreno said those aspects play a “crucial role by providing a counter-narrative to the dehumanizing rhetoric of the local and federal governments.”
“By examining the representation of the hurricane’s impact in literature and other art forms, I aim to untangle the links between colonialism, anti-Blackness, disaster capitalism, climate change, and migration,” she said. “It has been more than seven years since Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, yet much of the archipelago is still experiencing the consequences of the storm – or what I call the ‘afterlives of disaster.’”
Puerto Rican cultural production, Moreno contends in her project, resists the colonial violence that reproduces the afterlives of disaster by being life-affirming and a testament to the survival of the Puerto Rican people.
This project, Moreno said, can also shed light on how cultural creation can uplift resistance to colonial violence and help imagine a decolonial future, especially for communities in the Global South. She also believes this is especially topical as vulnerable communities of color face challenges in light of globalization and climate change.
“I am extremely grateful to everyone who has supported me,” she said. “Winning this fellowship has given me a renewed sense of confidence in this project, which is very close to my heart.”
Other College of Arts and Letters NEH award recipients are Jon Bullock, an assistant professor in the Department of Music; Therese Cory, the John and Jean Oesterle Associate Professor of Thomistic Studies in the Department of Philosophy; and Ulrich Lehner, the William K. Warren Foundation Professor in the Department of Theology.
“I am delighted that the NEH has once again recognized the exceptional research projects our faculty are pursuing,” said Sarah Mustillo, the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts & Letters. “These four awards underscore the high caliber of diverse scholarship across our disciplines and invaluable guidance offered by ISLA throughout the fellowship application process.”
Notre Dame and Johns Hopkins University were the only institutions to have four faculty win individual NEH fellowships this year, and Notre Dame faculty have won more NEH fellowships than any other private university in the country since 2000. Notre Dame’s success has been driven in large part due to faculty research support provided by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.
This story was derived from one originally posted at al.nd.edu.