Keishla Rivera-Lopez

Dr. Keishla (Kay-shla) Rivera-Lopez is a literary and cultural studies scholar, writer, and poet specializing in Latina/o and Caribbean literature, Latinx Studies, and Puerto Rican Studies with a focus on Latinidad, cultural production, archives, and memory. She received a PhD in American Studies at The Graduate School-Newark at Rutgers University where she was awarded the 2019-2020 Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship. Her dissertation received a special recognition distinction for the 2021 Virginia Sanchez-Korrol Dissertation Award Prize by the Puerto Rican Studies Association. Dr. Rivera-Lopez received her B.A. in Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies and American Studies in 2015 from Rutgers University-New Brunswick where she was a Ronald E. McNair scholar. She was a 2022 NEH Postdoctoral Research Fellow in American Studies at Montclair State University where she launched the “New Jersey Latino Experiences During the Covid-19 Pandemic” Oral History Project. Currently, Keishla is a research associate for the inaugural Rooted and Relational Fellowship in the 2024-2025 “Archives, Memory, and Present Past of Puerto Rico” cohort at The Center for Puerto Rican Studies . With this fellowship, Dr. Rivera-Lopez is working on her first book, Boricua Projects: Puerto Ricans Rewriting Culture, Motherhood, and Memory Beyond Archives, which is under contract with Ohio State University Press. Dr. Rivera-Lopez is also developing DominiRicanDH, an inter-institutional digital humanities collaborative initiative with her co-PI Dr. Omaris Z. Zamora. Keishla was born and raised in Newark, NJ to Puerto Rican migrants and reflects on what it means to be a child of diaspora in her scholarship and writing. In her free time she enjoys writing poetry, short-stories, plays and essays. Her writing has been published in Centro Journal, Label Me Latina/o Journal, Hispanofila Journal, Chiricu Journal, The Acentos Review, Decolonial Passage, The Newarker, and The Journal for Latina Feminist Criticism. In 2019 her play “Puerto Rican Kitchen” was selected for the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Short Play and Monologue Theatre Festival and won second place for the “Best of the Fest” Award.

Publications:

• “Gendered Exile: Examining the Avian and Nautical Metaphors in Julia de Burgos’s Poetry,” Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, Fall 2024.

• “Puerto Rican Diasporic Novels: Witnessing State Violence and Contesting Freedom in Nicholasa Mohr’s Felita & Nilda,” Label Me Latina/o Journal, Fall 2022.

• “A Reflection on Teaching and Impact,” Princeton University Admissions Site Blog, https://admission.princeton.edu/blogs/brief-reflection-teaching-impact-and-latinx-representation, October 2023

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• Guest Lecture in the Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies Department at Hunter College in 2024 and 2025: “Literatures of the Caribbean Diasporas: Fragmented Memory and Puerto Rico”

• “Beyond Archival Erasures” at the “AfroLatinx Life and Writing” Symposium at Texas A&M University, February 2024

• Guest Lecture and Talk in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at Princeton University: “Poetics, Memory, and Writing Lived Experiences”

Previous Organizations: 

• The Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College

• Princeton University

• Rutgers University

Accomplishments:

• 2024-2025 ISGRJ Arts, Culture, Public Humanities Research Seed Grant Recipient

• 2024-2025 Inaugural Rooted and Relational Fellowship at The Center for Puerto Rican Studies

• 2022 National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Montclair State University

Upcoming Projects:

• My book, Boricua Projects: Puerto Ricans Rewriting Culture, Motherhood, and Memory Beyond Archives

My academic research is fundamentally rooted in carving spaces for the stories of women and communities of color who are silenced and marginalized. My goal is to participate in the recovery and documentation of untold stories, including stories about women’s lives, to shift dominant discourses that render them invisible/expendable. I pursued a doctorate in American Studies at Rutgers University–Newark to conduct interdisciplinary research and combine my passion for literature, history, and cultural studies. My research, pedagogical practice, and social justice endeavors are foregrounded on decolonial, and antiracist thought and women of color feminist theory, which pushes me to do work that is inclusive and just. As an educator, I use my classroom as a space where decolonial practices take place through the curation of reading materials and the frameworks used to analyze them. My book, Boricua Projects: Puerto Ricans Rewriting Culture, Motherhood, and Memory Beyond Archives examines and showcases how alternative ways of knowing and remembering are used by numerous communities to reconcile with erasure and marginalization. I specifically focus on the works by authors and artists that challenge the narratives and current memory of the Puerto Rican experience told to us by museums, textbooks, archives, and the media that often omit diverse experiences of Puerto Ricanness. Often, their narratives reproduce racist, sexist, and/or classist representations of Puerto Rican identity, and thus, misinform and exclude. As a praxis of re-narration, I engage with archives and other projects centered around memory that exist outside of mainstream conceptualizations of archivization. Cultural memory projects are imperative to preserving and documenting histories and notions of heritage, but they must be challenged and questioned. In my book, I am led by these questions: are these archives sufficient, and how do they document and preserve culture, heritage, and legacy? Who and what is being included and excluded? I am particularly motivated by the opportunity to include cultural memory projects that focus on displaced and marginalized communities, those which exist outside of mainstream conceptualizations of archivization, that offer a re-telling of dominant discourses and help reshape our understanding of historical moments.

DominiRicanDH is a digital humanities project that tells a story that is often invisibilized–the tensions, solidarities, and re-imaginings of these inter-Caribbean diasporic communities through forming an archive of music, art, performance, and activism that highlights the diasporic Dominican and PuertoRican, as well as DominiRican diaspora communities in the U.S. DominiRicanDH aims to be a catalyst for recovery work in terms of re-narrating this experience to include DominiRicans in the Puerto Rican and Dominican national discourse and diasporic experiences in the United States and Puerto Rico. 

Led by Omaris Z. Zamora, Assistant Professor, Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies, School of Arts and Sciences, New Brunswick and Keishla Rivera-Lopez, Research Associate, Rooted and Relational Fellowship, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, CUNY

https://globalracialjustice.rutgers.edu/what-we-do/scholarshipresearch-archive/art-culture-and-public-humanities