Julio Quinones (MM ’22, Music Composition) was offered and accepted a “Crossing Latinidades Mellon Humanities Fellowship” for the 2025-26 academic year. This as part of their fellowship program that includes a “Summer Institute in Latino Humanities, Methodologies and Theories” at the University of Illinois at Chicago campus towards the end of June. During the upcoming academic year, Quinones will be participating in online professional development workshops and writing labs that will aid in working towards the dissertation proposal. This program is designed to offer doctoral students who are doing their doctoral dissertations in the field of Latino Studies, to have an extra year of funding while receiving support in writing their dissertation proposal and while fulfilling preliminary doctoral exams requirements.
As part of the Summer Institute Quinones got to present on his dissertation topic: Componer en Puertorriqueños: Puerto Rican Classical music and the use of cultural signifiers as a performance of identity. He will be writing critically about the historical trends of music composition in Puerto Rico and how they’ve been questioned, and recontextualized by contemporary composers in the diaspora. Soem questions he is asking include: What makes Puerto Rican classical music sound Puerto Rican? How have Puerto Rican classical composers used musical elements (such as plena, bomba, salsa other popular forms) to construct, rebel and negotiate explorations and performances of their Puerto Rican identity? What potential “meanings” can these uses represent and what are the issues they represent to the performance of an identity?