Andrea N. Mendoza Meléndez is an upcoming Puerto Rican PhD graduate student at The University of Chicago, arriving in 2024. In her undergraduate studies, she completed a BA at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras (UPRRP), double majoring in French and Francophone Studies and Comparative Literature in 2021. At the undergraduate level, Mendoza centered her research on Otherness and Subalternity in French Postcolonialism in the Caribbean, and Scandinavian Medieval Literature. For her final research paper for the BA in Comparative Literature, she analyzed one of the “monsters” in Beowulf, Grendel, in her work titled “Grendel: More than Just a Monster.” While applying Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s ideas in his article “Monster Culture: Seven Theses,” and Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias, Mendoza proposed to challenge the traditional reading of Grendel as a jealous and evil monster and to shift this view to one of a being that is villainized by the Christian influences of the text providing a new gaze to the topic by applying Monster theory and French philosophy. For her French studies, Mendoza dedicated her research project to analyzing the characters of Anne Hébert’s novel, Les fous de Bassan, where she examined the gender dynamics within the characters, and how otherness is established from these parameters.
At the graduate level, she completed an MA in Comparative Literature in 2024. Throughout her graduate studies, she has dedicated her research projects to studying and questioning the representation of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean from Early Modern to recent times. In 2022, she participated in a paper presentation at Ohio State University in a segment titled “Addressing Death”. Mendoza presented: “Addressing Hurricane Maria's Deaths in Puerto Rico: The Role of Remembrance in the Mourning Process”, which was a research project that centered around not only comparing the data of death tolls, loss of housing, and past hurricane data, but it also examined the tragic stories told by the Puerto Rican communities’ members of their lost family members. In May 2023, she presented at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University what would be her paper (and future thesis): “Burial Rituals in the Early Middle Ages and the Caribbean: The Role of Women among the Rus and the Taíno Communities,” where she analyzed the accounts and data available from historical chroniclers such as Ibn Fadlān and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés regarding women participating in burial rituals of the Rūs’ People and Taíno communities respectively. The project examines the subaltern state of existence of the women within these cultures since women were forcefully sacrificed in some of the burial practices.