Ricardo L. Ortíz was born in Cuba in 1961; he and his family immigrated to the US, and settled in Los Angeles, CA, in 1966.

He completed his undergraduate work in English and Economics at Stanford University in 1983, where he earned high honors for a thesis on Walt Whitman; he completed his graduate work (a Master's in 1987 and a doctorate in 1992) in English at UCLA, where he completed a dissertation on Henry Fielding's Tom Jones under the direction of Prof. Maximilian Novak. At UCLA he also completed significant coursework and research in Critical and Cultural Theory with among others Ralph Cohen, Samuel Weber and Jacques Derrida.

Since receiving his doctorate in 1992 Prof. Ortíz has been a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory in the English Departments at San José State University (92-96) and Dartmouth College (96-98); between 1992 and 1998 he also held visiting appointments at the University of Oregon, UCLA, Tufts University and Vermont College.

 

In 1998, Prof. Ortíz took a tenure-track position in US Latino Literature in the English Department at Georgetown University; he was awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor at Georgetown in 2005. At Georgetown, Prof. Ortíz is affilicated as well with the Programs in American Studies and Comparative Literature, and with the Centers for Latin American Studies and Minority Educational Affairs. He was appointed Director of Georgetown's Master's program in English in July of 2008.

 

From January 2006 to July 2007 Prof. Ortíz held a visiting position as Director of the American Communities Program, an endowed Chair at the level of full professor, at the California State University, Los Angeles.

 

Prof. Ortíz's first book, Cultural Erotics in Cuban America, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2007.

 

His journal and book-chapter publications since arriving at Georgetown have include "LA Women: Jim Morrison with John Rechy" in The Queer Sixties, ed. Patricia Juliana Smith (Routledge, 1999); "Revolution's Other Histories: the Critical, Cultural and Sexual Legacies of Roberto Fernández Retamar's Caliban," in Social Text (Spring 1999), co-winner of the 1999 Crompton-Noll Award in Lesbian and Gay Studies, awarded by the Lesbian and Gay Caucus of the Modern Language Association; various entries in Garland's Gay Histories and Cultures: an Encyclopedia, ed. George Haggerty (2000); and "Hemispheric Vertigo: Cuba, Québec and Other Provisional Reconfigurations of Our (New) America(s)," in The Futures of American Studies, eds. Donald Pease and Robyn Weigman (Duke UP, 2002); and "Fables of (Cuban) Exile: Special Periods and Queer Moments in Eduardo Machado's Floating Island Plays in Modern Drama (Spring 2005); and "Arturo Islas and the ‘Phantom Rectum’" in Contemporary Literature (Fall 2007). He also regularly writes review pieces for The Lambda Book Review.

 

In recent years he has been invited to give, and has given, public talks on topics related to his research by the Graduate Center of CUNY (2000); Williams College (2000); the University of Québec, Montréal (2001); Duke University (2001); the University of Chicago (2002, 2006), Northwestern University (2004, 2005); the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (2004); the University of Southern California (2004, 2005); the University of Michigan (2006); UCLA (2007); NYU (2007, 2008); the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2008) and the University of Maryland (2008). He has also delivered papers or chaired panels at recent conferences of the National Association of Chican@ Studies (2001); the American Studies Association (2001, 2004, 2007), the American Literature Association (2006, 2008), the American Comparative Literature Association (2002, 2007), the Modern Language Association (2004, 2007), the Latin American Studies Association (2004, 2006), and the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University (2002, 2003, 2006).

 

He has completed serving three-year terms on the Board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY (99-02) and the Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association (99-02); he was re-elected to the MLA’s Delegate Assembly for another 3-year term (08-11), and in 2007 he was elected to both the Executive Committee of the MLA’s Division of Gay Studies in Language and Literature, and to the American Studies Association’s Standing Committee on Ethnic Studies.

 

Prof. Ortíz is bilingual in English and Spanish, and has a reading knowledge of French and Italian; he also completed an immersion program in Haitian Kreyól as part of his participation in the July 2004 Haitian Summer Institute at Florida International University .