Ramón E Soto-Crespo

RAMÓN E. SOTO-CRESPO is the James M. Benson Professor in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He served as Director of the Latino Studies Program at The State University of New York at Buffalo from 2002 to 2012.  He was awarded the Lorraine Lawton Prize for Excellence in Comparative Literature and the award for Excellence in History. He is the author of Mainland Passage: The Cultural Anomaly of Puerto Rico (2009), which won Honorable Mention at the 2009 Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latino and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies, The White Trash Menace and Hemispheric Fiction (2020), and most recently, Neobugarrón: Heteroflexibility, Neoliberalism, and Latin/o American Sexual Practice (2023).  He currently serves as co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. ​​His latest book-length manuscript, Wild Caribbean: Literature, Ecology, and Climate Change, is in progress.

His essays have appeared in peer-reviewed academic journals such as American Literary History, Atlantic Studies, Modern Language Notes, Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, and Textual Practice.  And in edited collections such as Archipelagic American Studies (Duke UP), Porn Archives (Duke UP), and Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (U of Chicago P).

Fellowships and grants from the Center for Advanced Studies, the Ford Foundation, the University of Wisconsin Institute on Race and Ethnicity, the Schomburg Foundation, Dr. Nuala McGann Drescher Research Fellowship, the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, the UB Humanities Institute, the UIUC Humanities Research Institute, and the UIUC LAS Faculty Study in a Second Discipline Program have supported Soto-Crespo's research.