Our warmest congratulations to Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Martha S. Weeks Chair in Latin American Studies at University of Miami, who was recently selected as a 2024 Ford Foundation Senior Fellow. Here is more information from the National Academies page.

2024 AWARDEE

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel

Martha S. Weeks Chair in Latin American Studies
University of Miami

“The Caribbean Women Legacy Project”

The goal of the Caribbean Women Legacy Project is to create a repository of oral histories of Caribbean women who were active in the 1970s through the 1990s to showcase their political, social and cultural agency in the region. Following work on community based archives by Michelle Caswell, T-Kay Sangwand and Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, as well as Jeanette Bastian’s scholarship on the ethical articulation of joint archives in the Caribbean, the goal is to create open access collections that will be kept jointly by the University of Miami, the Digital Library of the Caribbean and at local institutions based in the Caribbean in the country of origin of the women interviewed.  Ford Foundation support will be used to travel to Puerto Rico to complete the groundwork necessary to design the structure of the project and identify where we will archive the oral histories at the University of Puerto Rico. This phase of the project is facilitated by Dr. Mabel Rodríguez Centeno, my faculty host at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras.

The proposed project culminates more than 30 years of training and research as a comparative Caribbean literary and cultural critic with expertise in narrative and storytelling and a certification as an oral historian and end of life doula focusing on legacy projects.  I completed a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in Latin American and Caribbean cultural studies and I have devoted my research and scholarship to recover the stories of those who are usually not included in history books: women, queer and trans* subjects, Afro-Caribbean writers and thinkers, and colonial subjects.  After devoting an entire career to academic publishing, research and teaching, I will focus on the public digital humanities component of my career. The final outcome of this project will not be an academic book, but a hands-on experience for faculty, independent scholars and students and an open access oral history digital project available to researchers and scholars in the Caribbean and the U.S. This research project combines theorization and oral history collection, as well as program and institutional building efforts that includes a digital oral history archive, training and mentoring of graduate students and faculty members based in the Caribbean that will collaborate in the oral history collection. Further dissemination of findings will be achieved through scholarly and public facing publications on oral history collecting and innovative Caribbean research methodologies, Wikipedia entries for the women interviewed and searchable finding aids for the archives housed at the University of Miami and the Digital Library of the Caribbean.

For more information, see https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/ford-foundation-senior-fellowship/awardees