Ricardo L. Ortíz is an Associate Professor in the Department of English.

From Spring 2006 through Summer 2007 Prof. Ortíz 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.

Prof. Ortíz specializes in U.S. Latino/a Literatures and Cultures. He is also interested in teaching and research in "Américas" Studies; critical and cultural theory; cultural studies; intellectual history; gender and queer theory; popular culture.

He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. (in 1987 and 1992, respectively) from the University of California Los Angeles, and his B.A. from Stanford University (in 1983).

Prof. Ortiz's first book, Cultural Erotics in Cuban America, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in early 2007; a second book project (well under way) is entitled Testimonial Fictions: the Post-Dictatorial Mode in US Latino Literature.

His 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).

Prof. Ortíz has two articles forthcoming in late 2007, one on the Chicano novelist Arturo Islas will appear in the journal Contemporary Literature, and the other, on Celia Cruz and Wyclef Jean's hiphop rendition of "Guantanamera," will appear in the journal Social Text. A third article, entitled “Edwidge Danticat’s Latinidad: The Farming of Bones and the Cultivation (of Fields) of Knowledge,” is due to appear in the collection Aftermaths: Exile, Migration, Diaspora, which is currently under consideration at Rutgers UP.

Prof. Ortíz is also a regular contributor of review pieces to The Lambda Book Report.