Puerto Rican Studies Hub Marks a Successful First Year of Programming at UW Madison

Aurora Santiago-Ortiz, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies and Chicanx/e and Latinx/e studies, and Jorell Melendez Badillo, associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean history, co-creators of the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s new Puerto Rican Studies Hub are seen in a portrait taken at the Wisconsin Institute for Discover on Dec. 15, 2025. (Photo by Althea Dotzour / UW–Madison)

The Puerto Rican Studies Hub (PRSH) at the University of Wisconsin Madison is closing its first year with a strong record of public programming, scholarly exchange, mentorship, campus collaboration, and institutional growth. Since its launch, the Hub has positioned UW–Madison as an important site for Puerto Rican Studies in the Midwest, creating spaces where scholars, artists, students, and community partners can think together about Puerto Rico, Puerto Rican diasporas, and the future of the field. PRSH began the year with an energetic inaugural event featuring Los Pleneros de la Cresta, a plena ensemble from Ciales, Puerto Rico. Held at Memorial Union’s Great Hall, the event brought together more than 200 attendees for an evening of music, storytelling, and collective participation. As both celebration and public pedagogy, the gathering set the tone for the Hub’s approach to programming: intellectually rigorous, community-facing, and grounded in Puerto Rican cultural practice. The Hub also launched the Francisco Scarano Lecture Series, named in honor of the Puerto Rican historian and UW–Madison emeritus professor. The inaugural lecture established the series as an annual space for bringing leading voices in Puerto Rican Studies to campus and connecting their work with students, faculty, staff, and broader publics. Together with the Hub’s cultural programming, the lecture series helped create a visible and sustained presence for Puerto Rican Studies at UW–Madison during PRSH’s first year. A major highlight of the inaugural year was the Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rican Studies Symposium, held in April 2026. The symposium brought together leading and emerging scholars from across the field for two days of conversation around the forthcoming volume Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rican Studies, edited by PRSH co-directors Aurora Santiago Ortiz and Jorell Meléndez-Badillo. The gathering created a space for sustained dialogue about the histories, methods, institutional challenges, and future directions of Puerto Rican Studies, while also bringing national conversations in the field to UW–Madison. In conjunction with the symposium, PRSH launched El Taller: Solidarity Mentorship Workshops. This initiative brought scholars working on substantial works-in-progress to campus and paired them with senior mentors for intensive feedback and exchange. The workshop model created an intimate space for intellectual development, allowing participants to refine their projects while building relationships with scholars and students at UW–Madison. El Taller reflects one of PRSH’s core commitments: supporting rigorous scholarship through mentorship, collaboration, and collective inquiry. The Hub’s first year also included the launch of the Luisa Capetillo Cultural Series, a public-facing initiative designed to connect Puerto Rican Studies with broader conversations in arts, culture, literature, performance, and community life. Among the year’s public programs was the Roundtable with Puerto Rican Authors, which brought Cezanne Cardona, Nicole Delgado, and Xavier Valcárcel to campus for a conversation on contemporary Puerto Rican literature, writing, publishing, and cultural work. The event offered students and community members an opportunity to engage directly with writers whose work speaks to the complexities of Puerto Rican life in the archipelago and diaspora. Another significant achievement was the successful hiring of two PRSH-affiliated postdoctoral fellows, who will join UW–Madison in the Hub’s second year. One of these appointments, Daniel Vázquez Sanabria, will be housed in the Chicanx/e and Latinx/e Studies Program, strengthening the relationship between PRSH and CLS. Vázquez Sanabria’s work brings together Puerto Rican Studies, Disability Studies, colonialism, language, race, and the anthropology of disability, opening important connections between Puerto Rican Studies and broader conversations in Latinx/e Studies, accessibility, diaspora, embodiment, and community-engaged scholarship. The second postdoctoral appointment will be housed in Spanish and Portuguese, further extending PRSH’s cross-campus collaborations and its commitment to supporting new scholarship in Puerto Rican Studies. PRSH also advanced planning for its Study Away in Puerto Rico program, which will take UW–Madison students into direct engagement with communities, artists, scholars, and cultural organizations in Puerto Rico. The program is designed to help students think critically about the relationship between the archipelago and the diaspora while learning from community-based and cultural workers on the ground. In its planning phase, the Hub built partnerships that will support a meaningful experiential learning opportunity for students interested in Puerto Rican Studies, Latinx/e Studies, Caribbean Studies, history, culture, and community-based research. As PRSH looks toward its second year, it does so with a growing network of collaborators, two incoming postdoctoral fellows, and a strong record of successful programming. Beginning in year two, the Hub will also have dedicated meeting and office space in Ingraham Hall, where it hopes to foster an ongoing sense of community among students, faculty, staff, visiting scholars, artists, and others interested in Puerto Rican Studies and Caribbean Studies more broadly. This space will support the Hub’s intellectual and public-facing work while offering an informal gathering point for conversation, mentorship, collaboration, and collective inquiry. Through symposia, mentorship workshops, cultural events, student programs, postdoctoral appointments, and new spaces for community-building, the Puerto Rican Studies Hub has begun to build an ambitious and generative platform for scholarship, creative work, and collective exchange at UW–Madison and beyond. Spring 2026 Newsletter