Ricardo Ortiz

Associate Professor and Chair, English

Georgetown University, Department of English

Ricardo L. Ortiz began serving as Chair of Georgetown University’s Department of English on 1 July 2015; he is an Associate Professor of US Latino Literature and Culture and also served as Director of Graduate Studies from July 2008 to July 2014. He was awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor at Georgetown in 2005.

Prof Ortiz’s second book, Latinx Literature Now: Between Evanescence and Event, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in early 2019, in both Palgrave’s Pivot and its Literatures of the Americas series.

Prof. Ortiz’s first book, Cultural Erotics in Cuban America, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in early 2007; it was awarded Honorable Mention for the Modern Language Association’s 2008 Alan Bray Book Prize, which recognizes outstanding scholarly contributions to Queer Literary and Cultural Studies. His third book project, The Testimonial Imagination: Cold War Geo-Politics and the Cultures of US Latinidad, is well under way. While Prof. Ortiz specializes in U.S. Latino/a Literatures and Cultures, he is also interested in teaching and research in hemispheric, transnational Americas Studies, critical and cultural theory, cultural studies, intellectual history, race, gender and queer theory, political theory, and popular culture.

Since 2010 Prof. Ortiz has published a variety of scholarly, critical and reference pieces in such collections as Imagined Transnationalism: US Latino/a Literature, Culture and Identity (Palgrave, 2010), Gay Latino Studies: a Critical Reader (Duke UP, 2011), The Routledge Companion to US Latino Literature (2012), GLQ (2014), The Cambridge Companion to Latino Literature (2016), The Cambridge History of Latino Literature (2018), and After Queer Studies (2019).

Prof. Ortiz was appointed to the Committee on the Literatures of People of Color for the Modern Language Association in 2017; in 2018 he also completed a three-year term as a jurist for the Matei Calinescu Prize in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Studies, also for the MLA. From 2016 to 2018 Prof. Ortiz also served as co-chair of the Washington, DC, area site committee for the 2018 national meeting of the Latino Studies Association, working with colleagues at the U of Maryland, George Washington U, the U of Virginia, and the Smithsonian Institution to bring 500 scholars of US Latino Studies to the nation’s capital.

In 2013 Prof. Ortiz also completed tenures of multiple years as Chair of the Standing Committee on Ethnic Studies of the American Studies Association and on the Executive Committee of the Division of Gay Studies in Language and Literature of the Modern Language Association. Between 2009 and 2012 he also directed four major conferences and symposia on the Georgetown campus, two for the Americas Initiative of Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences (2009, 2012) and two for the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice (2010, 2011). Since 2010 Prof. Ortiz has also been a consultant on matters of US Latino literature, culture and history with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, where he regularly conducts enrichment programming with groups of CHCI Fellows and Interns.

Prof. Ortiz published two journal articles in the 2007/2008 academic year. One, on the Chicano novelist Arturo Islas, appeared in Contemporary Literature in the fall of 2007, and the other, on Celia Cruz and Wyclef Jean’s hiphop rendition of ”Guantanamera,” appeared in Social Text in the spring of 2008. A third article, entitled “Edwidge Danticat’s Latinidad: The Farming of Bones and the Cultivation (of Fields) of Knowledge,” appeared in the collection Aftermaths: Exile, Migration, and Diaspora Reconsidered (Rutgers UP, 2008).

From Spring 2006 through Summer 2007 Prof. Ortiz was on leave from Georgetown while he served as the Director of the American Communities Program in the College of Arts and Letters at the California State University, Los Angeles. At Cal State LA he held the Joseph A. Bailey II, MD, Endowed Chair in American Communities, at the level of Full Professor.

His less recent scholarly publications include: an article entitled “Fables of (Cuban) Exile: Special Periods and Queer Moments in Eduardo Machado’s Floating Island Plays” in the journal Modern Drama (Spring 2005); another article entitled ”Hemispheric Vertigo: Cuba, Quebec, and Other Provisional Reconfigurations of Our (New) América(s)” in The Futures of American Studies (Duke UP, 2002); entries on various topics in the encyclopedia Gay Histories and Cultures (Garland, 2000); other published articles include: ”Revolution’s Other Histories: the Sexual, Cultural and Critical Legacies of Roberto Fernandez Retamar’s ‘Caliban”’ (Co-Winner, Crompton-Noll Prize for Best Essay in Queer Literary Studies), in Social Text, Spring 1999; ”L.A. Women: Jim Morrison with John Rechy” in The Queer Sixties (Routledge, 1999) and ”Docile Bodies, Volatile Texts: Prison Writing in the Cuban Diaspora” in Annals of Scholarship (1998). Earlier in the 1990’s he also published articles in Studies in English Literature, The Yale Journal of Criticism, and The Journal of Homosexuality.

Prof. Ortiz earned his M.A. and Ph.D. (in 1987 and 1992, respectively) from the University of California Los Angeles, and his B.A. in English and Economics from Stanford University (in 1983). And before coming to Georgetown in 1998 he held tenure track positions at San Jose State University and Dartmouth College. Prof. Ortiz was born in Cuba in 1961 and left with his family in 1966; he grew up in the Los Angeles area and attended Bishop Amat Memorial High School in La Puente, CA, graduating in 197

Education

University of California-Los Angeles – Ph.D.

University of California-Los Angeles – M.A.

Stanford University – B.A.