Assistant Professor of Black and Latino Studies Dr. Rojo Robles has been selected as a 2022 Summer Faculty Fellow for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute for Higher Education. He will be participating in a professional development program titled, “Concepts of Black Diaspora in the United States: Identity and Connections among African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American Communities.”
Dr. Robles is a Puerto Rican professor, writer, playwright, and filmmaker. He graduated from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras with a BA in Theater and an MA in Comparative Literature. He holds an MPhil and PhD from the Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures Department (LAILAC) at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His research interests are located at the intersection of Latin American and Caribbean Literature and Film and Afro-Latinx Cultural Studies. With a Baruch colleague, Rebecca Salois, who also teaches in the BLS Department, he co-hosts a podcast called Latinx Visions.
He has published articles in SX Salon| Small Axe Project, Taller Electric Marronage, The Puerto Rico Review, Revista Cruce, Revista Iberoamericana and has been a cultural critic at 80grados.net for more than a decade. He is the editor of Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri’s posthumous chapbook Condom Poems 4 Sale One Size Fits All (Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, 2019). He is currently at work on a book project about Boricua out-of-the-page poetics and dispersed archives of dissent. He is also developing a series of articles about cinegraphic and intermedial literature in Puerto Rico, Latin America, and US Latinx communities.
Since 2004 he is the artistic director of the independent group, El kibutz del deseo, dedicated to producing plays, films, and publishing fiction and poetry. He is the author of Los desajustados/The Maladjusted (2015) and Escapistas (2017) and the writer, director, and producer of the experimental film The Sound of ILL Days (2017).
