Jorell Meléndez-Badillo

Biography

I am a historian of Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America and the author, most recently, of the critically acclaimed book, Puerto Rico: A National History (Princeton University Press, 2024), translated to Spanish by Aurora Lauzardo Ugarte as Puerto Rico: historia de una nación (Grupo Planeta, 2024). I am also the author of The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2021) and Voces libertarias: Orígenes del anarquismo en Puerto Rico (Secret Sailor Books, 2013).

I am the co-editor of Without Borders or Limits: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Anarchist Studies (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013) and editor of Páginas libres: Breve antología del pensamiento anarquista en Puerto Rico (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021). I am also the co-editor of Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rican Studies, forthcoming with Duke University Press in 2026. I am currently finishing a monograph titled A Counter-Republic of Letters: Friendship, Revolution, and Anarchist History-Making, under contract with Duke University Press. My next research project explores the impact of U.S. higher education during the war of 1898 in the Caribbean. I have published extensively in the form of book chapters, public-facing articles, and scholarly publications in leading peer-reviewed journals including the Hispanic American Historical Review, Small Axe, International Journal of Working-Class History, and Caribbean Studies, among others.

More recently, I collaborated with global superstar Bad Bunny in the creation of historical narratives that accompanied each song’s YouTube visualizer in DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. I also wrote 40 historical and cultural short texts that are used in the screens of Bad Bunny’s historic residency in Puerto Rico. My work has been featured in the LA Times, Vogue, New York Magazine, Good Morning America, Univisión, Telemundo, AFP, La Nación, La Jornada, and El Nuevo Día, among many national and international outlets.

Before UW-Madison, I was a Mellon Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College. I am from the capital of the Caribbean: Aguadilla, Puerto Rico.

Education

Ph.D., University of Connecticut
M.A., Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico
B.A., Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico

Books

Selected Publications

Peer-Review Articles

• “Luisa Capetillo and the Caribbean’s Counter Republic of Letters.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 69 (Nov. 2022): Forthcoming.
• “A Party of Ex-Convicts: Bolívar Ochart, Carceral Logics, and the Socialist Party in Puerto Rico, 1917-1928,” Hispanic American Historical Review vol. 101, no. 1 (February 2021): 73-99.
• “Mateo and Juana: Racial Silencing, Epistemic Violence, and Counterarchives in Puerto Rican Labor History,” International Labor and Working-Class History Journal vol. 96 (Fall 2019): 103-121.
• “Imagining Resistance: Organizing the Puerto Rican Southern Agricultural Strike of 1905,” Caribbean Studies Journal vol. 43, no. 2 (July-December 2015): 33-82.
• “Labor History’s Transnational Turn: Rethinking Latin American and Caribbean Migrant Workers,” Latin American Perspectives vol. 42, no. 4 (July 2015): 117-122.

Book Chapters

• “Radical Genealogies: The Beginnings of Anarchism in Nineteenth-Century Latin America” Routledge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Latin America, edited by Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Graciela Montaldo. Forthcoming, 2023.
• “Luisa Capetillo en La Habana: Sus escritos en la prensa anarquista cubana, 1910-1914.” In Amor y anarquía: Los escritos de Luisa Capetillo, edited by Julio Ramos. Cabo Rojo: Ediciones Educación Emergente, 2021.
• “The Anarchist Imaginary: Max Nettlau and Latin America, 1890-1934.” In Writing Revolution: Hispanic Anarchist Print Culture and the United States, edited by Montse Feu-López and Chris J Castañeda. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019.
• “The Puerto Rican Experiment: Crisis, Colonialism, and Popular Response.” In The End of the World as We Know It? Crisis, Resistance, and the Age of Austerity, edited by Deric Shannon. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014.
• “Interpreting, Deconstructing, and Deciphering Ideograms of Rebellion: An Approach to the History of Reading in Puerto Rico’s Anarchist Groups at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.” In Without Borders or Limits: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Anarchist Studies, edited by Meléndez Badillo, Jorell and Nathan Jun, 57-75. Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.

Other Academic Publications and Public Scholarship

• “A Brief Reflection on Thinking Against the Archive of Puertorriqueñidad,” Caliban’s Readings: The Caribbean Philosophical Associaton’s Blog (April 24, 2022).
• “Camacho-Quinn’s gold medal sparked a debate about Puerto Rican national identity,” The Washington Post’s Made by History, (August 6, 2021).
• “La Calle Fortaleza in Puerto Rico’s Primavera de Verano,” co-authored with Aurora Santiago Ortiz, Decolonial Geographies of Puerto Rico’s 2019 Summer Protests, online forum edited by Marisol LeBrón and Joaquín Villanueva, Society and Space Journal (February 25, 2020).
• “Commemorating May Day in Puerto Rico,” NACLA Report on the Americas vol. 51, no. 3 (September 2019): 301-305.
• “Puerto Rico’s Multiple Solidarities: Emergent Landscapes and the Geographies of Protest,” co-authored with Aurora Santiago-Ortiz, The Abusable Past by Radical History Review (July 22, 2019).
• “Los ecos del silencio: Dimensiones locales y aspiraciones globales del periódico Voz humana.” Revista La Brecha vol. 2, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 23-27.
• “Voces libertarias: The Economic, Political, and Social Discourse of Puerto Rican Anarchism, 1900-1917.” Theory in Action: The Journal of the Transformative Studies Institute vol. 5, no. 4 (2012): 6-12.
• “Expresiones anarquistas dentro de la prensa y la cultura proletaria puertorriqueña de principios del siglo XX.” Kálathos: Revista Transdisciplinaria Metro-Inter vol. 6, no. 1, (2012).
• “El cabildo secular en Puerto Rico: Siglos XVI-XVIII.” Kálathos: Revista Transdisciplinaria Metro-Inter vol. 5 , no. 1 (2011).

Advisor To

• Sofia Rivera

History Courses

• History 201 – The Historians Craft: Afterlives of the War of 1898 in the Caribbean – Syllabus 2022 (pdf)
• History 260 – Introduction to Latin America – Syllabus 2023 (pdf)
• History 347 – The Caribbean and Its Diasporas – Syllabus 2022 (pdf)
• History 500 – Reading Seminar in History: Transnational Utopias: Anarchism Across the Americas – Syllabus 2023 (pdf)