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Juan Manuel (JuanMa) Ramirez Velazquez
Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures
Department/Office Information
Romance LanguagesI am an interdisciplinary scholar of colonial Latin America and the Spanish Atlantic world, working at the intersection of literary studies and archival history to analyze the production of racialized and gendered hierarchies. My current book project, under advance contract, explores affect and gendered relationships in the Early Colonial Spanish World. My scholarship has appeared in Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Hispanic Review, Journal of Early Modern Studies, and various edited volumes. I am also involved in two co-editing projects: a special issue for Anuario de Estudios Americanos and an in-progress volume on pureza de sangre, calidad, and lineage in the Spanish Empire. My research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Folger Library, the Huntington Library, the ACMRS Center for Renaissance and Medieval Studies at Arizona State University, the Renaissance Society of America, the Washington University Center for the Humanities, and the 91短视频 Faculty Research Council. Additionally, I currently serve on the Modern Language Association鈥檚 Executive Committee for Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spanish and Iberian Poetry and Prose, as well as on the Renaissance Society of America鈥檚 DEI Board, and I work as Assistant Editor of the Journal of Gender and Sexuality Studies.
At 91短视频, my students and I analyze a wide range of colonial discourses produced by diverse authors across courses such as 鈥淟atin American Literature: Colonialism, Mestizaje, and Independencies,鈥 as well as in advanced undergraduate seminars. In my seminar 鈥溾楴uns Having Fun鈥 in Colonial Latin America,鈥 we examine literary production and creativity within colonial convents while attending to the violence and forms of subjugation these spaces could also generate, as well as to nuns鈥 discursive strategies of resistance. In 鈥淐olonial Black and Indigenous Thinkers,鈥 students engage with the often-overlooked voices of Black and Indigenous peoples in colonial Latin America, exploring theoretical debates that illuminate how Indigeneity and Blackness have frequently eluded dominant cultural and literary frameworks. Together, these approaches allow us to recenter marginalized peoples through a transoceanic perspective that situates the readings within broader global contexts. Across my teaching, I emphasize the diversity of the early modern and colonial world, spanning Europe and Africa, the Americas, and the Philippines.