Richard T. Rodríguez is Associate Professor of English and Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he is also affiliated with the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He received his B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research, teaching, and writing are grounded in Latina/o cultural studies, literary and film studies, and queer theory. The author of numerous articles and reviews, his book, Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics (Duke University Press), won the 2011 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award. Recently named a Conrad Humanities Scholar, a designation supporting the work of promising associate professors in the humanities within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Illinois, he is currently writing a book on queer Latino representation in film and literature and the politics of social space.

Event presented by the Chicano Latino Research Center, cosponsored by the Departments of Literature and Feminist Studies, and the Center for Labor Studies.