About

Ralph E. Rodriguez is a Professor of American Studies and English at Brown University. His research focuses on Latinx literature, contemporary fiction, critical race studies, and textual politics. He is the author of the books Latinx Literature Unbound: Undoing Ethnic Expectation, which analyzes the possibilities and limitations of the ethno-racial label Latinx in literature, and Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Identity, a critical study examining the struggles of Chicanas/os with issues such as feminism, homosexuality, familia, masculinity, mysticism, and border relations through the lens of detective fiction. His current projects include writing about Latinx memoirs, multilingual and transnational writers, and personal life reflections. Rodriguez has engaged in notable conversations with prominent authors such as Edwidge Danticat, Jesmyn Ward, Cristina Garcia, Dariel Suarez, and Valeria Luiselli, contributing to discussions on race, ethnicity, and literature. His teaching interests encompass Latinx literature, creative non-fiction, contemporary fiction, and critical race studies, and he has received teaching awards from Brown University, Penn State University, and the University of Texas. His work demonstrates a long-standing interest in aesthetics, textual politics, and literary form, supported by funding from various prestigious institutions.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• Geography
• History
• Anthropology
• Ethnology
• Mathematical analysis
• Mathematics
• Psychology
• Criminology
• Literature
• Psychoanalysis
• Archaeology
• Genealogy
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• The Latinx Novel

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Geography
  • Gender studies

  Abstract This chapter investigates the formal and thematic diversity of the Latinx novel after the Second World War. Grounded in the long history of Latinx writing in the US, the chapter charts the significant trends that have marked the Latinx novel during this period: the shift from more individually identified group terms such as “Chicana/o,” “Puerto Rican,” “Nuyorican,” and “Cuban American” regularly deployed in the 1960s and 1970s to the growing use of umbrella terms such as “Hispanic” and “Latinx” from the 1980s to the present; the increased attention to feminist and LGBTQ issues beginning in the mid-1980s; and, from roughly 1990 to the present, the growing diversity within Latinx communities (notably an increase in immigration from Central America) and an increased geographic dispersion of those communities, among other trends

  PublisherDOI

• Acknowledgments

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2023

  • Geography

  Elizabeth Ault, was every thing: patient when I needed it but also mindful of timing (and the paper shortages of the pandemic supply chain!);I'm especially

  DOI

• 16 Men with Guns: The Story John Sayles Can’t Tell

  New York University Press eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Art
  • Criminology
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 4. The Lyric, or, a Radical Singularity in Latinx Verse

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Art
  • Mathematics
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 1. Brown Like Me? The Author- Function, Proper Names, and the Rise of Fictional Nobodies

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020-10-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• From Where I Stand: The Intimacy and Distance of We and You in the Short Story

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2018-05-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter analyzes the rare focalization of fiction through the first-person plural (<italic>we</italic>) and the second person (<italic>you</italic>). It is particularly interested in the affective textures these narrative perspectives create in terms of intimacy and distance, within the story and between narrator and reader. In carrying out this analysis, it examines Manuel Muñoz’s story “Monkey, Sí,” Patricia Engel’s story “Green”, and Ana Menéndez’s story “Why We Left.” In each of the stories, the narrators navigate traumatic life experiences—rape, eating disorders, and a miscarriage, respectively. The chapter does a close reading of how pronominal use affects the characters’ and readers’ emotional experience of the story before them.

  PublisherDOI

• Latinx Literature Unbound

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2018-05-08 · 12 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Since the 1990s, there has been unparalleled growth in the literary output from an ever more diverse group of Latinx writers. The extant criticism, however, has yet to catch up with the diversity of writers we label Latinx and the range of themes about which they write. Little sustained scholarly attention has been paid, moreover, to the very category— <italic>Latinx</italic> —under which we group this literature. <italic>Latinx Literature Unbound</italic> , thus, begins with a fundamental question “What does it mean to label a work of literature or an entire corpus of literature <italic>Latinx</italic> ?” From this question a host of others spin out: What does that grouping allow us to see, predispose us to see, and preclude us from seeing? If the grouping—which brings together a heterogeneous collection of people and groups under a seemingly homogeneous label—tells us something meaningful, is there a poetics we can develop that would facilitate our analysis of this literature? In answering these questions, <italic>Latinx Literature Unbound</italic> seeks to unbind Latinx literature from taken-for-granted critical assumptions about identity and theme. It argues that there may be more salubrious taxonomies than <italic>Latinx</italic> for organizing and analyzing this literature. Following a neo-formalist interpretive model that privileges reading as a temporal, meaning-making event, the book argues that genre may be a more durable category for analyzing this literature. Finally, <italic>Latinx Literature Unbound</italic> suggests some ways in which we might want to proceed as we move forward with future studies of the writing we have come to identify as <italic>Latinx</italic> .

  PublisherDOI

• Brown Like Me? The Author-Function, Proper Names, and the Rise of Fictional Nobodies

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2018-05-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter demonstrates the ways in which the two principal criteria for defining Latinx literature—identity and theme—are insufficient in making sense of this body of writing. It looks at three representative cases to demonstrate conclusively that we need a better way to understand the literature we have heretofore labelled Latinx. It examines a white writer (Daniel James) who, under a Latinx name (Danny Santiago), penned in the 1980s a popular Chicano novel of the barrio. It shows how the author of the novel <italic>The Madonnas of Echo Park</italic>, Brando Skyhorse, further confounds our understanding of identity matters and Latinx literature. He was raised as Native American and only as a teenager discovered he had a Mexican biological father. He has since written a memoir, <italic>Take This Man</italic>, about his upbringing, race, and ancestry. Finally, the chapter turns to a readily recognizable Latino author, Eduardo Halfon. However, this particular author writes on themes that critics would not readily identify as Latinx.

  PublisherDOI

• Latinx Literature Unbound

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2018-03-28

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Lyric, or, a Radical Singularity in Latinx Verse

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2018-05-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Latinx, especially Chicana/o and Nuyorican, poetry has long been known for its political leanings and its employment in numerous social movements, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. At the forefront of much of this poetry has been a narrative tradition. Less well known is the lyric and experimental tradition in Latinx poetry. This chapter focuses on poetry that cannot readily be paraphrased as having a message or making a political statement. It examines poems that do not easily accord with what we understand Latinx literature to be and that do not in some transparent way represent a Latinx worldview. The lyric poetry by Eduardo Corral, Rosa Alcalá, and Amanda Calderón analyzed in this chapter strikes a dissonant chord with the tradition of narrative-driven Latinx poetry.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ramón Saldívar

  82 shared

• Renee Perez

  University of Iowa

  81 shared

• Bassam Sidiki

  81 shared

• Damon Schweik

  Michigan State University

  81 shared

• T. Blanco Moya

  Georgetown University

  81 shared

• Saldaña Josefina

  Michigan State University

  81 shared

• Sarah Waggoner

  Southwestern University

  81 shared

• Julie C. Ellis

  University of Pennsylvania

  81 shared

Awards & honors

• William G. McLoughlin Award for Excellence in Undergraduate…
• MLA Best Book Prize in Latina/o and Chicana/o Literary and C…
• Rock Ethics Institute Grant for Latina/o Ethics Interest Gro…
• Woodrow Wilson/Andrew W. Mellon Career Enhancement Fellowshi…
• Department of Comparative Literature Teaching Excellence Awa…