Michael Reyes Salas, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, was selected by both the Institute for Citizens and Scholars for a 2025 Career Enhancement Fellowship, and by the Camargo Foundation for its flagship fellowship program. Citizens and Scholars Career Fellows are outstanding junior faculty committed to campus engagement and innovative research in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. The Camargo Foundation’s fellowships support artists, scholars, and thinkers from around the globe with 10-week residencies in Cassis, France.

During his fellowship terms, Michael will work on his book project Fragments of Carceral Memory, a comparative visual and literary study that examines French Antillean-Guianese, Puerto Rican, and Northern Irish photo-texts—books straddling serial photography and writing to create narratives—of prison ruins. His book poses and seeks to answer a central question: Why do some former prisons and jails achieve the status of cultural heritage site and remain preserved while others are razed to oblivion?

Michael explores photographic imagery of penal artifacts, penitentiary displays, and prison ruins from the 1880s to the early 2010s to show how heritage projects use carceral visuality to naturalize penal power. He also seeks to explain how the state’s representational practices too often transform prisons into spectacles that commodify violence for mass cultural consumption. Focusing on successful as well as failed transformations of prisons into heritage sites across Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, San Juan, and Belfast, he demonstrates how artists who re-envision decayable penal infrastructure by merging documentary and art photography alongside critical essays can help spectators activate radical modes of witnessing that denaturalize the prison and legitimize abolitionist discourse.

The range of Michael’s book covers the 1889 Paris World’s Fair penitentiary exhibition’s curatorial discourse and display strategies, the preservation efforts of penal colony ruins in South America, and the contested demolition of a Caribbean prison that architects fought to keep intact, to the wrecking of Northern Ireland’s notorious Long Kesh Detention Centre. Ultimately, his work interrogates the visual power that emanates from the systemic practices of imprisonment and the role that visual counter narratives of incarceration play in changing how we (un)see prisons.

Vassar's Committee on Research, which offers internal funding for faculty research and creative projects, provided partial support for the field research.