President of the Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA) Roberto Márquez (William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Mount Holyoke College) announces the inaugural annual membership meeting of the association, in conjunction with a one day symposium organized around the theme “Puerto Rican Studies for a New Century: Challenges, Prospects and Possibilities.” With featured speakers Edna Acosta-Belén, Juan Flores, and Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, the symposium will be held on Saturday, October 29, 2011, from 10:00am to 2:00pm, in Assembly Room 615W, at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY), 68th Street and Lexington Avenue, New York City.

Edna Acosta-Belén is Distinguished Service Professor of Latin American, Caribbean, U.S. Latino and Woman’s Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY, where she has served as Director of its Center for Latino, Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She is co-founder and editor of the Latin(a) ResearchReview and author of works such as Puerto Ricans in the United States: A Contemporary Portrait (with Carlos Santiago) and Researching Women in Latin America and the Caribbean (with Christine Bose).  

Juan Flores is professor of social and cultural analysis in the Latino Studies Division of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Winner of the prestigious international Casa de Las Americas Prize for Insularismo e ideología burguesa (1980), he was also the recipient, in 2009, of its Premio Extraordinario de Estudios sobre los Latinos en Estados Unidos for his collection Bugalú y otros guisos: ensayos sobre culturas Latinas en Estados Unidos. His other publications include Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity (1980), From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latin Identity (2000), A Companion to Latina/o Studies (2007), and The Diaspora Strikes Back (2009).

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is associate professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Writer, poet, playwright, and performer, he is the author of Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (2009) and a collection of short stories, Uñas pintandas de azul/Blue Fingernails (2009).

To pre-register for this event, go to http://prsa2011symposium.eventbrite.com/

For more information on this event and other PRSA activities, see http://www.puertoricanstudies.org/

[Image: Antonio Martorell’s 2001 “Homenaje a Magritte (Esto no es una Marina)”]