[email protected]
Research and Teaching Interests
Caribbean and Latinx literatures and cultures; poetics; gender and sexuality; transnational feminisms; translation; friendship; archival studies; modernism and avant-garde cultures
Vanessa Pérez-Rosario is an award-winning writer and translator. She is currently working on a new book project tentatively titled “Las Girlfriends: A Cultural History of Latina Feminisms, 1980-1990,” for which she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. She is the author of Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon (University of Illinois Press 2014), which is also available in Spanish, Julia de Burgos: la creación de un ícono puertorriqueño (University of Illinois Press 2022) which received Silver Award Winner for Best Latina Themed Book and an Honorable Mention for the Dolores Huerta Best Cultural and Community Themed Book at the 2023 International Latino Book Awards. She is editor of the bilingual critical edition titled I Am My Own Path: Selected Writings of Julia de Burgos (University of Texas Press, 2025). She also edited Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement (Palgrave 2010).
She translated into English Mayra Santos-Febres’ collection of poetry entitled Boat People (Cardboard House Press 2021) which received Honorable Mention for Best Bilingual Poetry Book at the International Latino Book Awards in 2023. Vanessa Pérez-Rosario is managing editor of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.
Awards And Fellowships
- National Endowment for the Humanities, Faculty Fellowship Program, $60,000, 2025-2026 for new book project, “Las Girlfriends: A Cultural History of Latina Feminisms,1980-1994”
- Faculty Presider, Rooted & Relational Fellowship, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, Funded by the Mellon Foundation, 2024 – 2025
- “The Latinx Past: Archive, Memory, Speculation,” a working group of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, Co-Principal Investigator, funded by the Mellon Foundation, $310,000, 2022-2024
- “In Modernism’s Wake: Styles and Infrastructures of Caribbean Artistic and Intellectual Practice,” A Small Axe Project, Mellon Foundation, $200,000, 2021 – 2024.
- Distinguished Fellow, Advanced Research Collaborative, The Graduate Center, Fall 2018
- Mellon Mid-Career Fellowship, The Center for Globalization and Social Change, The Graduate Center—CUNY, 2016-2017
- Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty, Scholar & Citizens Foundation (formerly Woodrow Wilson Foundation), June 2010-June 2011
- Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, Spring 2010
- Short Term/ Summer Publication Grant, American Association of University Women, July 2009-June 2010
- Library Scholars Summer Grant, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, Summer 2009
Selected Publications
Books
Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon, University of Illinois Press, 2014
Julia de Burgos: La creación de un ícono puertorriqueño, University of Illinois Press, 2022
- Silver Award Winner for Best Latina Themed Book and an Honorable Mention for the Dolores Huerta Best Cultural and Community Themed Book at the 2023 International Latino Book Awards
Edited Works
I Am My Own Path: Selected Writings of Julia de Burgos, University of Texas Press, 2025 (A bilingual critical edition)
Guest Editor, “The Idea of Hispanophone Caribbean Studies,” Small Axe 51, November (Special Issue)
Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010
Translation
Boat People, by Mayra Santos-Febres, Cardboard House Press, 2021
- Honorable Mention for Best Bilingual Poetry Book at the International Latino Book Awards in 2023
Articles
“The Archive and Our Intellectual Inheritance,” to be published in Archives, Memory, and the Present Past of Puerto Rico: An Anthology, Centro Press (forthcoming)
“La otra Julia/ The Other Julia”, Centro Journal, vol. xxxvii, no. 1 (2025): 184-191.
Keywords in Caribbean Studies: A Project Statement. Vanessa Pérez-Rosario (co-authored with Ryan Cecil Jobson. Small Axe 1 July 2022; 26 (2 (68)): 80–84.
“Mas yo resto: Entrevista con Nancy Morejón.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism no. 65 (2021)
“Multilingual Ecology in CUNY-NYSIEB Schools.” K. Menken, V. Pérez-Rosario, L. Guzmán-Valerio. In Translanguaging and Transformative Teaching for Emergent Bilingual Students: Lesson from the CUNY-NYSIEB Project. Edited by CUNY-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals. NY: Routledge. 131-146, 2021
“Migrating Women / Border Icons.” Women and Migration. Ed. Deb Willis. Cambridge, UK: Open Books Publishing, 2019
“Latina Feminist Theory and Writing,” Cambridge History of Latino/a Literature, eds. Laura Lomas and John Morán González. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, 488-509
“Julia de Burgos.” Oxford Bibliographies in “American Literature.” Ed. Mary Pat Brady.
New York: Oxford University Press. July 24, 2018. Online. www.oxfordbibliographies.com.
“Changing Linguistic Landscape and Cultivating a Multilingual a Multilingual Ecology in Schools: New Scenery and Language Education Policies.” Co-authored with Kate Menken & Luis Valerio Guzman. Linguistic Landscape, 2018.
“On Beauty and Protest.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly. Vol. 46 (Spring/Summer 2018): 279-285.
“The Afterlives of Julia de Burgos.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism no. 54, November (2017). 209-218.
“On the Hispanophone Caribbean Question,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism no. 51, November (2016): 20-31.
“Latinas Write the New York City Diaspora,” Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas. Vol 47, Issue 2, November (2016): 164-171
“Julia de Burgos,” Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, edited by Franklin Knight and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016
“Convertirse en Julia de Burgos, ícono puertorriqueña.” Hablan sobre Julia: Reflexiones en su centenario. Eds. Carmen M. Rivera Villegas and Lydia Pagán Tirado. Ponce, PR: Casa Paoli del Centro de Investigaciones Folclóricas de Puerto Rico, 2015
“Journalism as Puerto Rican Cultural and Political Transnational Practice.” Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. Vol. 15, Num. 2 (2013): 4-27.
“Julia de Burgos Inscribed on the Cultural Map of New York City.” Translation Review. University of Texas, Dallas (2011): 73-81.
