Juan G. Ramos

Juan G. Ramos is a Professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. He was born and lived in Guayaquil, Ecuador before 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 Master of Arts and PhD in Comparative Literature and a graduate certificate in Latin American Studies. 

His book Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics and Latin American Arts (University of Florida Press, 2018) explores the concept of decolonial aesthetics as related to the development of antipoery, the nueva canción movement, and New Latin American Cinema during the 1960s and early 1970s. He is co-editor of the volume entitled Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures (Palgrave, 2016), which brings together 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 the 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. 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, early twentieth-century modernist fiction, and twenty-first-century Latin American fiction.

At Penn, he will continue working on a 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 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). During the 2024-2025 academic year, he will also be a visiting researcher in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University.

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).