Ricardo Quintana Vallejo

I am excited to join the English Department at Rhode Island College in the fall of 2022, having completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and my doctorate in comparative literature at Purdue University. I am passionate about teaching literature with interdisciplinary and intersectional frameworks that foreground the societal systems of power and oppression at work in artistic and cultural production. I also love teaching on topics of identity development and cultural hybridity; diaspora and displacement; race and ethnicity; and gender and sexuality.

My research explores contemporary diasporas and global migration in coming-of-age novels and other narratives of youth development written in the context of globalized and de facto multicultural societies.

My first book, Children of Globalization, studies contemporary Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels—which subvert the horizon of expectations of the originating and archetypal form of the coming-of-age genre, the traditional Bildungsroman. This early-nineteenth century iteration encompassed the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen, and illustrated middle-class, European, “enlightened,” and overwhelmingly male protagonists who became accommodated citizens, workers, and spouses whom the readers should imitate. Conversely, Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels have manifold ways of defining youth and adulthood. The culturally-hybrid protagonists, often experiencing intersectional oppression due to their identities of race, gender, class, or sexuality, must negotiate what it means to become adults in their own families and social contexts, at times being undocumented or otherwise unable to access full citizenship, thus enabling complex and variegated formative processes that beg the questions of nationhood and belonging in increasingly globalized societies worldwide.

I am working on expanding my previous research to analyze LGBTQ+ and queer experiences in diasporic contexts, particularly in comics and graphic narratives of development. I am also interested in the emerging field of literary cartography and metaphorical mapping.

I was born and raised in Mexico City.