Ronald Mendoza-de JesúsActing Associate Professor, Comparative Literature

Biography

Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús is Acting Associate Professor of Comparative Literature. His first book, Catastrophic Historicism: Reading Julia de Burgos Dangerously (Fordham University Press, 2023), lays the theoretical groundwork for a non-historicist concept of literary history through an examination of the place of Julia de Burgos—the most canonical of Puerto Rico’s national poets—within the constellation of Puerto Rican modernity. He’s currently working on two book projects: Unworldly Islands: Non-Sovereign Poetics and Caribbean Life reconstructs an Antillean political imaginary that reckons with the failures of the project of post-colonial sovereignty in the region, foregrounding the work of Caribbean thinkers who imagine the Antilles as a political space no longer ruled by the desire for sovereignty. Another Bio-politics: Deconstructing Life for Democracy’s Survival, develops the concept of life implicit in Derrida’s deconstructive engagement with the history of metaphysics, political philosophy, and contemporary biology to make the case that the survival of democracy demands that we rethink life itself in democratic terms. His essays on continental philosophy, deconstruction, and Caribbean studies have appeared in Qui Parle, Small Axe, CENTRO Journal, Diacritics, Discourse, Mosaic, the New Centennial Review, the Oxford Literary Review, and other journals and edited volumes. 

Research Interests

Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy

Caribbean Studies

Deconstruction

Psychoanalysis

Theories of Modernity and Temporality

Publications

Catastrophic Historicism: Reading Julia de Burgos Dangerously (Fordham, 2023)