Jorell Meléndez Badillo is the author of Voces libertarias: Los orígenes del anarquismo en Puerto Rico (Secret Sailor Books, 2013; Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo-CNT, 2014; Editorial Akelarre/CEISO, 2015) and co-editor of Without Borders or Limits: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Anarchist Studies (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). He has published book chapters, as well as journal and newspaper articles on the histories of anarchism, labor, and radical politics in Puerto Rico and Latin America. His work has appeared in Caribbean Studies Journal, Latin American Perspectives, Theory in Action, Kalathos, La brecha, among others. He holds a Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of Connecticut and has also been a recipient of the Candrall Cordero Fellowship, the Ford Foundation’s Dissertation Fellowship, and UConn's Humanities Institute Dissertation Fellowship.
His current project tells the story of how a cluster of self-educated workers burst into Puerto Rico’s world of letters at the turn of the twentieth century. These workers navigated the polity that emerged from the 1898 U.S. occupation by asserting themselves as citizens, as producers of their own historical narratives, and ultimately, as learned minds. His project shifts the historiographical focus from class-based analyses towards the study of workers’ intellectual yearnings, aesthetic sensibilities, and radical desires.
By following leads, often as small as a stamp on a letter, he has traced the trajectory of workers that went from being ignored by the cultural elite to eventually become part of the national mythology. Following these traces have taken him to archives in Puerto Rico, Europe, and the United States, and allowed him to document how workers participated in the international circulation of print media, imagining themselves as part of the global labor community. However, while these workers took part in these transnational networks, labor leaders enacted exclusions locally by pushing black people, women, and non-skilled workers to the margins of the labor movement they founded and the historical archive they produced.
He is currently a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Dartmouth College's Department of History and will transition to Assistant Professor of History on July 1st, 2020.
His current project tells the story of how a cluster of self-educated workers burst into Puerto Rico’s world of letters at the turn of the twentieth century. These workers navigated the polity that emerged from the 1898 U.S. occupation by asserting themselves as citizens, as producers of their own historical narratives, and ultimately, as learned minds. His project shifts the historiographical focus from class-based analyses towards the study of workers’ intellectual yearnings, aesthetic sensibilities, and radical desires.
By following leads, often as small as a stamp on a letter, he has traced the trajectory of workers that went from being ignored by the cultural elite to eventually become part of the national mythology. Following these traces have taken him to archives in Puerto Rico, Europe, and the United States, and allowed him to document how workers participated in the international circulation of print media, imagining themselves as part of the global labor community. However, while these workers took part in these transnational networks, labor leaders enacted exclusions locally by pushing black people, women, and non-skilled workers to the margins of the labor movement they founded and the historical archive they produced.
He is currently a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Dartmouth College's Department of History and will transition to Assistant Professor of History on July 1st, 2020.