Department of English

Ricardo L. Ortíz is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, where he was appointed Director of Graduate Studies in July 2008.

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; 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. A second book project, well under way, is entitled Testimonial Fictions: the Post-Dictatorship Mode in US Latino Literature and Culture.

Prof. Ortíz published two journal articles in the 2007/2008 academic year. One, on the Chicano novelist Arturo Islas, appeared in the journal Contemporary Literature in the fall of 2007, and the other, on Celia Cruz and Wyclef Jean's hiphop rendition of "Guantanamera," appeared in the journal 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, published by Rutgers UP in the fall of 2008.

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).

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