Theatre Arts & Performance Studies

Iván A. Ramos is assistant professor in the Department of Theater Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. He was previously an assistant professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Riverside. He received his PhD in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from UC Berkeley and his BA in Critical Gender Studies from UC San Diego. Iván is originally from Tijuana, Mexico.

Iván’s broader research investigates the links and slippages between transnational Latino/a American aesthetics in relationship to the everydayness of contemporary and historical violence. In particular, he is interested in how the aesthetic may provide a way to engage with an ethics of difference. His work brings together performance studies, queer and feminist theory, Latina/o/x American Studies, and media and film studies. His first book, Sonic Negations: Unbelonging Subjects, Inauthentic Objects, and Sound between Mexico and the United States (forthcoming from NYU Press), examines how “dissonant sound” brought together artists and alternative subcultures on both sides of the border in the wake of NAFTA to articulate a politics of negation against larger cultural and economic changes. He is also currently at work on a second book project, tentatively titled Death Without Mourning, which argues that experimental aesthetics provide a way to grapple with ongoing violence in the Americas without relying on biographical narratives that limit collective mourning to certain “proper” subjects. He has published on subjects ranging from the Chicana artist Xandra Ibarra, the work of the late scholar José Esteban Muñoz, and the aesthetics of the tv show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, among other subjects.

His work has been supported by fellowships from the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the National Humanities Center and the Ford Foundation. In addition, his writing has appeared in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latina/o Literature, Third Text, Women & Performance, ASAP/Journal, among others. He was also a contributor to the award winning catalog for the exhibition Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. sponsored by the Getty Foundation. He has articles forthcoming in the anthologies Turning Archival (forthcoming from Duke University Press) and Great North American Stage Directors, Volume 8 (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic). He currently sits on the editorial board for the journal Afterimage.