Ralph Rodriguez
Associate Professor, American Civilization and Ethnic Studies. Director of Graduate Studies:
American Civilization
Phone: +1 401 863 7995
Ralph_Rodriguez@brown.edu
I am currently writing a book on pleasure and contemporary U.S. literature. My project has its antecedents in the works of scholars such as Roland Barthes, Janice Radway, and Fredric Jameson. I am particularly interested in how the category of pleasure is produced, represented and received in a variety of popular literary forms, such as the detective novel, the graphic novel, and the queer novel among others.
Biography
Ralph E. Rodriguez (Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin, 1997) is Associate Professor in the Department of American Civilization and at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. He is the author of Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Identity (University of Texas Press, 2005). He has also published articles on a range of Latina/o authors, critical pedagogy, queer theory, detective fiction, and film. Latina/o literature and culture, graphic novels/comic books, queer theory, cultural theory, race, ethnicity, and feminism constitute his active research and teaching interests.
His projects have received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanites, the Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Mellon Foundations, the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University, and Oregon State University's Center for the Humanities. He has received teaching awards from the Universitiy of Texas, Penn State University, and Brown University. He is currently a member of the PMLA editorial board and a former member of the editorial board of Aztlan: A Journal of Chicana/o Studies. He regularly referees for a host of journals in American Studies, literary studies, and film studies.
Interests
In my critical study of the Chicana/o detective novel, Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Identity(2005), I examined the struggles of Chicanas/os with feminism, homosexuality, familia, masculinity, mysticism, the nationalist subject, and U.S.-Mexico border relations. Chicana/o novels register crucial new discourses of identity, politics, and cultural citizenship that cannot be understood apart from the historical instability following the demise of the nationalist politics of the Chicana/o movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast to that time, when Chicanas/os sought a unified Chicano identity in order to effect social change, the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s have seen a disengagement from these nationalist politics and a new trend toward a heterogeneous sense of self. The detective novel and its traditional focus on questions of knowledge and identity turned out to be the perfect medium in which to examine this new self. I am now analyzing the production, representation, and reception of pleasure in contemporary U.S. literature.
Awards
William G. McLoughlin Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Social Sciences, 2009-2011
MLA Best Book Prize in Latina/o and Chicana/o Literary and Cultural Studies, 2006
Rock Ethics Institute Grant for Latina/o Ethics Interest Group, 2004
Woodrow Wilson/Andrew W. Mellon Career Enhancement Fellowship, 2002-2003
Department of Comparative Literature Teaching Excellence Award, 2001-2002
Oregon State University Center for the Humanities Fellow, 1998-1999
Oregon State U. Fellowship to Support Undergraduate Research, Summer 1998
Summer Mellon Fellowship, 1996
University of Texas Department of English Teaching Excellence Award, 1995-1996
National Endowment for the Humanities Younger Scholar, 1991
Lincoln-Lane Foundation Scholar, 1989-92
Member, Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society
Member, Sigma Tau Delta, International English Honor Society
Affiliations
American Studies Association
Latina and Latino Literature and Culture Society
Modern Language Association
Teaching
I regularly offer courses in Chicana/o and Latina/o literature and culture, cultural theory, and popular culture forms such as detective novels and comic books.
Funded Research
Rock Ethics Institute Grant for Latina/o Ethics Interest Group, 2004 ($2,000)
Woodrow Wilson/Andrew W. Mellon Career Enhancement Fellowship, 2002-2003 ($30,000)
Oregon State University Center for the Humanities Fellow, 1998-1999
Summer Mellon Fellowship, 1996
National Endowment for the Humanities Younger Scholar, 1991
Curriculum Vitae
