Joseph Miranda

Joseph Isaac Miranda joins Yale as a Postdoctoral Associate in English, after which he will begin as an Assistant Professor in English in the Fall of 2024. His research, writing, and teaching interests converge at the intersection of Latinx expressive practices, queer of color critique, and legal and political theory.

His first book project traces the ways Latinx literature, film, and television contend with the Insular Cases as they transformed over the 20^th century from a legal framework used to justify Puerto Rico’s suspension from the nation into an ethnographic hermeneutic that views Latinx at large as suspended from normativity. He argues that contemporary Latinx creatives experiment with a set of genres (bildungsroman, melodrama, televisual realism) and aesthetic practices (montage, seriality, ensemble) to depict the alternative structures of obligation that flourish without state recognition and beside categories of citizen, nation, or the heteronormative family in the long durée of the Insular Cases.

Miranda’s work has been supported by the Ford Foundation and his article, “Hiding in John Rechy’s Closet,” is forthcoming in MELUS Journal. He holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University.