Juan Manuel Ramírez Velázquez is a Ph.D. Candidate in Hispanic Studies with a graduate certificate in Latin American Studies and a Teaching Citation at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU). In addition, he is a 2022-2023 Graduate Fellow for the WashU Center for the Humanities. His areas of interest include sixteenth and seventeenth-century colonial discourse and cultural studies in the Iberian Atlantic World. In his dissertation, “Transgressive Mobilities: Women, Gender, and Affective Political Economies in the Ibero-Atlantic World, 1521-1650,” Juan Manuel studies the intersections of gender, race, and mobility in early modern and colonial Latin American legal documents through literary performance and affect theory. His dissertation project builds on the analysis of early modern judicial documents, such as proof of merits, testaments, and licenses, along with the intellectual history produced by early modern women writers. These topics are also explored in his forthcoming articles, “Sowing Wheat and Other Merits: The First Black ‘Conquistador’ of the Mexican Field” (forthcoming from Hispanic Review) and “Maternal Landscapes: An Answer to the Problem of Women’s Education in Colonial Mexico” (forthcoming from the Bulletin of Spanish Studies). Additionally, an excerpt of Juan Manuel’s dissertation has been recently abstract accepted by the Journal of Early Modern Studies for a special issue on subaltern writing and popular memory in the early modern world. Juan Manuel’s research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Washington University’s Department of Romance Languages and Literature, and the Latin American Studies Program. He has been the Graduate Student Coordinator of Sigma Delta Pi at WashU (2017-2020), has served as the Editorial Assistant for the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos during 2019-2020, and has been involved in a variety of departmental and university committees and initiatives.
Juan Manuel has eight years of teaching experience in US higher education institutions. He has taught language, cultures, and literatures courses and programs in both online and face-to-face settings. His teaching is directly connected to his research through the collective exploration and interpretation of silenced voices in published and unpublished literatures. His pedagogy has been praised by colleagues and professors, for which he has been awarded two teaching prizes. He was also selected by the WashU Center for Teaching and Learning to attend and complete the Teaching Summer Residency with the National Center for the Humanities in July 2022. His passion for teaching goes beyond the traditional academic scope as can be seen in his work as a Graduate Fellow for the WashU College Prep Program (2017-2022) and as a tutor for the Prison Education Project (2020). Juan Manuel is incredibly thankful for the opportunity to serve and work with underrepresented and marginalized peoples, as his understanding of social and educational justice has greatly expanded from this experience.