Juan G. Ramos

faculty smiling

Spanish Department
Professor, Spanish
Ph.D., University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Fields: 19th-21st Century Latin American and Spanish Poetry; 19th-21st Century Latin American Fiction; Aesthetics and Politics in Latin American Film and Music; Latin American Critical Thought

• CV (PDF) »

Email: jramos@holycross.edu
Office Phone: 508-793-2607 
Office: Stein 408
PO Box: 59A

Biography 

Juan G. Ramos was born and lived in Guayaquil, Ecuador prior to moving to New Jersey. At Rutgers-Newark, he completed a BA in English and secondary education and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst he completed a graduate certificate in Latin American Studies, as well as a Master of Arts and PhD in Comparative Literature. He is co-editor of the volume entitled Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures (Palgrave, 2016), which brings together a number of renowned Latin Americanists to engage with key concepts related to decolonial theories and thinking, while stressing points of contact with literary and cultural texts ranging from colonial period to the twentieth century, and bringing to the fore new ways in which such theoretical discussions can be fruitful to reanimate specific lines of inquiry in literary and cultural scholarship.

His book Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics and Latin American Arts (University of Florida Press, 2018) explores the concept of decolonial aesthetics, particularly in relation to the development of antipoery, the nueva canción movement, and New Latin American Cinema during the 1960s and early 1970s. He has also published on the connection between poetry and film, film and spectral theory, avant-garde literature in the Andes, as well as the historical crónica during modernismo.

He is currently working on a second book-length project tentatively entitled "Andean Modernismos: Affective Forms in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru," which studies poetry, fiction, literary criticism, translation, and literary journalism as literary forms that were at once innovative in transforming literary conventions, while producing emotional and affective responses among audiences in their national and international contexts. This book project engages with key scholarship in New Modernist studies, Andean studies, and Affect studies. To continue working on this project, he has been been awarded the M.H. Abrams Fellowship at the National Humanities Center (2021-2022) and a Faculty Fellowship from the College of the Holy Cross (Fall 2021).

In 2019, the College of the Holy Cross awarded him the Mary Louise Marfuggi Faculty Award for Outstanding Scholarship. From 2019 until 2022, he received the Arthur J. O’Leary Faculty Recognition Award, which is aimed at advancing faculty research and professional development. He is a past chair of the Ecuadorian Studies section of LASA (2018-2020), a past member of the PMLA Advisory Committee (2018-2021), and currently serves on the PMLA Editorial Board (2023-2025).

Courses

  • Span 101 - Elementary Spanish I
  • Span 102 - Elementary Spanish II
  • Span 202 - Intermediate Spanish II
  • Span 302 - Composition for Bilingual Speakers
  • Span 304 - Aspects of Spanish-American Culture
  • Span 305 - Introduction to Literary Genres
  • Span 308 - Readings in Latin American Literature
  • Span 407 - Topics in Modern Spanish and Spanish-American Poetry
  • Span 450 - Latinidades in Literature and Pop Culture

Research

  • Modernismo and Avant-Garde in Latin American Literatures

  • World Literature and Latin American Literatures

  • Decolonial Thought and Latin American Cultural Production

News

Recent Publications

Books

Edited Journal Dossiers

Select Peer-Reviewed Articles

Select Book Chapters

  • “The Affective Aesthetics of Fictional Objects.” Blackwell Companion to Latin American Literature, 2nd and revised edition. Ed. Sara Castro-Klarén. [in press; forthcoming in 2022]; 702-715.

  • “The Ideological Pendulum: South American Literary Interventions in Cold War Politics.” The Palgrave Handbook on Cold War Literature. Ed. Andrew Hammond. New York and London, Palgrave. 2020. 471-488.
  • “Teaching Comparative Arts and (De)Coloniality: Antonio Preciado, Elcina Valencia, and Chocquibtown.” Teaching Contemporary Latin American Poetry. (MLA Series Options for Teaching). Eds. Jill S. Kuhnheim and Melanie Nicholson. New York: Modern Language Association, 2019. 204-219.
  • “Rupturas pictóricas decoloniales del paisaje andino: Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco, Eduardo Kingman, Oswaldo Guayasamín ”. Visiones de los Andes: Ensayos críticos sobre el concepto de paisaje y región. Eds. Ximena Briceño and Jorge Coronado. La Paz: Plural Editores/University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. 105-131.
  • “Who Documents the Migrant? Decolonial Aesthetics, Museo de América, and the Internet Documentary Film.” Migrant Voices: Latin American Diaspora in Documentary Film. Eds. Esteban Loustaunau and Lauren Shaw. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018. 217-238.
  • "Disruptive Capital in Andean/World Literature: A Decolonial Reading of Enrique Gil Gilbert's Nuestro Pan." Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures. Eds. Juan G. Ramos and Tara Daly. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 141-160.
  • Ramos Juan G. and Tara Daly. "Introduction: Strategies for Reading and Looking with and against the Grain." Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures. Eds. Juan G. Ramos and Tara Daly. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. xiii-xxxvi.
  • "The Written Verse in Cinematic Verse: Eliseo Subiela's El lado oscuro del corazón as a Metapoetic Text." Verse, Voice and Vision: Poetry and the Cinema. Ed. Marlisa Santos. Lahman, MD: Scarecrow Press/ Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. 179-189.

Book Reviews and Encyclopedia Entries

  • Ramos, Juan G. Book Review of Cristina Burneo Salazar’s Acrobacia del cuerpo bilingüe. La poesía de Alfredo Gangotena. Leiden: Almenara Press, 2017, for Revista Iberoamericana Vol. LXXXV, Num 267 (Abril-Junio, 2019): 632-635.
     
  • Ramos, Juan G. Book Review of Michael R. Candelaria’s The Latino Christ in Art, Literature, and Liberation Theology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018, for The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History 76.3 (July 2019): 533-535.
     
  • Ramos, Juan G. Book Review of Dierdra Rebers’ Coming to Our Senses: Affect and an Order of Things for Global Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, for Humanity and Society 42.1 (February 2018): 132-134.

  • Ramos, Juan G. Book Review of Joanna Page's Creativity and Science in Contemporary Argentine Literature: Between Romanticism and Formalism. (Calgary: Calgary University Press, 2014.) MLN 132.2 (March 2017): 536-538.

  • Ramos, Juan G. “Enrique Dussel.” Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. Vol. 1. Eds. Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2016. 480-482. [1000-word entry]

  • Ramos, Juan G. “Latin American Culture.” Encyclopedia of Diversity and Social Justice. Vol. 2. Ed. Sherwood Thompson. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. 468-472. [3000-word entry].