Ricardo L. Ortiz Papers

Ricardo L. Ortiz is Associate Professor of US Latino Literature and Culture in Georgetown University’s Department of English, where he also served as Director of Graduate Studies from July 2008 to July 2014. He was awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor at Georgetown in 2005.

While Prof. Ortiz specializes in U.S. Latino/a Literatures and Cultures, he is also interested in teaching and research in hemispheric, transnational “Américas” Studies, critical and cultural theory, cultural studies, intellectual history, race, gender and queer theory, political theory, and popular culture.

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.

His second book project, Testimonial Fictions: Atrocity, Sexuality and Memory in Post-Cold War US Latino Literature is well under way. Since 2010 Prof. Ortiz has published a variety of scholarly, critical and reference pieces in such collections as Imagined Transnationalism: US Latino/a Literature, Culture and Identity (Palgrave, 2010), Gay Latino Studies: a Critical Reader (Duke UP, 2011) and The Routledge Companion to US Latino Literature (2012).

In 2013 Prof. Ortiz also completed tenures of multiple years as Chair of the Standing Committee on Ethnic Studies of the American Studies Association and on the Executive Committee of the Division of Gay Studies in Language and Literature of the Modern Language Association. Between 2009 and 2012 he also directed four major conferences and symposia on the Georgetown campus, two for the Americas Initiative of the Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences (2009, 2012) and two for the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice (2010, 2011).

Since 2010 Prof. Ortiz has also been a consultant on matters of US Latino literature, culture and history with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, where he regularly conducts enrichment programming with groups of CHCI Fellows and Interns.

Prof. Ortiz earned his M.A. and Ph.D. (in 1987 and 1992, respectively) from the University of California Los Angeles, and his B.A. in English and Economics from Stanford University (in 1983). And before coming to Georgetown in 1998 he held tenure track positions at San Jose State University and Dartmouth College.

Prof. Ortiz was born in Cuba in 1961 and left with his family in 1966; he grew up in the Los Angeles area and attended Bishop Amat Memorial High School in La Puente, CA, graduating in 1979. He died in August 2025.

[Georgetown University faculty profile]