Professor LatinX* is a hub of discovery! It invites any and all to see the ways that Latinx pop culture infuses, informs, and transforms the world we live in.
Online courses, videocasts, outreach events, books & book series, comics databases, and more, invite you to explore how pop cultural phenomena (TV, film, and comics especially) grows from and engages with different sociopolitical, historical, ancestral, and regional contexts.
Professor LatinX is a site that invites you to see the different ways that one can enrich understanding of creative and consumptive practices informed by religion, race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Professor LatinX invites you on a journey of shared inquiry where you can sharpen your critical thinking about the challenges and the prospects reflected in pop culture by those actively working to enrich and transform our mainstream imaginary.
I’ve served as a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder followed by 16 years at the Ohio State University where I was Distinguished University Professor, Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of English, University Distinguished Scholar, and Alumni Distinguished Teacher at the Ohio State University, as well as the recipient of the Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring and the Susan M. Hartmann Mentoring and Leadership Award.
I’m currently the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities in the English Department at the University of Texas, Austin. Here I also have affiliate faculty appointments in Radio-TV-Film, LGBTQ Studies, Center for Mexican American Studies, and Latin American Studies.
* A quick word on the term LatinX. I use Latinx not as prescriptive identifier but rather as one of many self-identification options we have, including Latino, Latina, Latine, Chicano/a, among others. For over 2 million people in the US, Latinx offers a useful and positive gender-neutral self-identifier. On a personal note, with Irish, Guatemalan and Mexican ancestral roots, Latinx captures well the complexity of my multiple cultural and geographic identities. It also importantly resonates Malcolm X, whose new identity denounced his slave name as well as with Professor X, who provides refuge for the outcast and disenfranchised muties in X-Men comics.