Joseph Miranda

Joseph Isaac Miranda is an Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. His research and teaching interests are Latinx Literature, queer of color critique, aesthetic philosophy, and legal and political theory. He is at work on his first book project How to Mourn a Fiction: Latinidad and the Law of Underdevelopment, which reads post-45 Latino Literature and Visual Culture to argue that the racialization of US Latinos relies on the legacy of a literary form emplotted into law—a suspended narrative of development. The project reveals how the Insular Cases– which are a set of Supreme Court decisions about the suspension of Puerto Rican sovereignty—are at the center of the protocols of Latino Literature, which simultaneously mourns this confining legacy of deferred freedom and upholds this law of underdevelopment as its central narrative imperative. Thus, Miranda contends, this contradictory relation between aesthetics and politics underpins a loss at the center of an ever-emergent Latino subject.

His work has been supported by the Ford Foundation and has received the 2025 MELUS Katharine Newman Best Essay Award and an honorable mention for the 2025 Crompton-Knoll Best Essay Prize from the GLQ caucus of the MLA and the American Studies Q/T Caucus. Miranda’s writing appears in MELUS Journal and American Literature.

Selected Publications

- “Hiding in John Rechy’s Closet” in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., Vol. 49, No. 1, Spring 2024.

- “The Suspended States of Latinx Literature” in American Literature, Vol. 96, No. 4, December 2024.

updated April 2025