A&L Faculty Win NEH Fellowships
On January 14, 2025, it was announced that four Arts & Letters faculty won NEH fellowships. Congratulations to Marisel Moreno, a Gender Studies Affiliated Professor of Latinx Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, for her project examining Hurricane Maria's cultural impact on Puerto Rico.
Amplifying Cultural Expression After a Disaster
Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in Sept. 2017, leaving the U.S. territory reeling from its aftermath that can still be felt today.
The following spring, in partnership with the University of Michigan, Moreno, whose area of expertise is U.S. Latinx literature, and Spanish professor Tom Anderson, led and co-produced and 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.
“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,” she said. “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.”
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 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.”
Originally published by Mary Kinney at al.nd.edu on January 22, 2025.
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