Dr. Ricia A. Chansky, Ph.D. '09

Senator John W. Maitland, Jr. Commitment to Education Award Winner

• Professor of English, University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez; Rincon, Puerto Rico

• Major: English

Dr. Ricia A. Chansky is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez (UPRM) as well as the director of the oral history lab where she leads projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mellon Foundation, and American Council of Learned Societies. She is an Assembling Voices Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics at Columbia University, director of the UPRM team of the Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico, a Climate Justice Fellow at the Humanities Action Lab at Rutgers-Newark, and a research fellow at the Centre for Research in Latin America and the Caribbean at York University.

Her research focuses on university-community collaborative projects that leverage university assets for the purpose of recording, preserving, and disseminating stories from communities on the front line of the climate emergency, especially those framed by intergenerational colonialism and environmental racism. Her current projects include collaboratively building community archives, structuring portable mass-listening stations, and developing climate communication strategies through data curation for internal and external audiences. Her current book project is a co-edited collection, Archiving Puerto Rico: Digital Time and the Temporalities of Disaster. Her recent books include The Divided States: Unraveling National Identity in the Twenty-First Century; Mi María: Surviving the Storm, Voices from Puerto Rico; and Maxy Survives the Hurricane / Maxy sobrevive el huracán.

Chansky is a member of the “Living Knowledge: Community-Centered Approaches to the History of Science" working group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and a Fullbright Specialist in American studies. She was recently recognized as a “Big Better” by the Rockefeller Foundation for her work on climate justice and as an International Climate Justice Advocate by the Museum of Tolerance/Simon Wiesenthal Center. She is featured in the museum’s interactive social lab as one of four activists whose work is highlighted in the Global Crisis Center section.