Ralph Rodriguez

Associate Professor, American Studies, Ethnic Studies, and English. Director of Graduate Studies:
American Civilization
Phone: +1 401 863 7995
Ralph_Rodriguez@brown.edu

I am currently working on two book projects. The first, "Still, Life in Fragments," examines the supposedly fragmented postmodern self and the role culture plays in negotiating, affirming, and rebutting that fragmentation. The second,"'Somebody in Between'": Latina/o Literature Unbound" takes a neo-formalist approach to analyze the aesthetic economy of race in contemporary Latina/o literature.

Biography

Ralph E. Rodriguez (Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin) 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; winner of the MLA Book Prize in Latina/o and Chicana/o Studies, 2006). 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, aesthetics, graphic novels, cultural theory, and critical race studies 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 University of Texas, Penn State University, and Brown University. He is a past member of the editorial boards of the PMLA and 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.

Both of my current critical books projects and my recent critical essays demonstrate a continued interest in aesthetics, textual politcs, and literary form.

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
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

Download Ralph Rodriguez's Curriculum Vitae in PDF Format