Baruch College Professor Rojo Robles Selected for National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for Higher Education
July 27, 2022
Baruch College Assistant Professor Rojo Robles, PhD, was selected as a 2022 Summer Faculty Fellow for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute for Higher Education.
As an NEH Summer Faculty Fellow, Dr. Robles in June participated in a professional development program titled, “Concepts of Black Diaspora in the United States: Identity and Connections among African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American Communities.”
Robles, who is a faculty member in the Black and Latino Studies (BLS) Department at the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, believes his participation in the program enhances both his research efforts and his pedagogy.
“Because of its critical openness, disciplinary crossings, and attention to pedagogy, the Institute is a crucial space of learning for participants teaching, immersing, and working with novel methods in Africana fields.”
Robles will use the opportunities afforded by the program to further develop his signature, student-centered teaching strategies, emphasizing a diversity of topics including the integration of native languages, cultural practices, and locales into diasporic art.
Writer, Playwright, Filmmaker, and Scholar
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Robles is a highly accomplished and interdisciplinary scholar.
He graduated from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras with a BA in Theater and an MA in Comparative Literature. He holds an MPhil and PhD from the Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures Department (LAILAC) at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His research interests are located at the intersection of Latin American and Caribbean Literature and Film and Afro-Latinx Cultural Studies.
He has published articles in SX Salon| Small Axe Project, Taller Electric Marronage, The Puerto Rico Review, Revista Cruce, Revista Iberoamericana and has been a cultural critic at 80grados.net for more than a decade. He is the editor of Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri’s posthumous chapbook Condom Poems 4 Sale One Size Fits All (Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, 2019).
Robles is currently at work on a book project about Boricua out-of-the-page poetics and dispersed archives of dissent. He is also developing a series of articles about cinegraphic and intermedial literature in Puerto Rico, Latin America, and US Latinx communities.
Since 2004, Robles has been the artistic director of the independent group, El kibutz del deseo, dedicated to producing plays, films, and publishing fiction and poetry. He is the author of Los desajustados/The Maladjusted (2015) and Escapistas (2017) and the writer, director, and producer of the experimental film The Sound of ILL Days (2017).
LISTEN: With a Baruch colleague, Rebecca Salois, who also teaches in the BLS Department, he co-hosts a podcast called Latinx Visions.
###