Dr. Jose Fernandez is an assistant professor in the Latina/o/x Studies Program at the University of Iowa. He received his Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University. His research interests include American, African American, and Latinx literary histories; Black and Latinx literatures after the 1960s; Latinx intellectual history; and Mexican American literature of the Borderlands.

His book Against Marginalization: Convergences in Black and Latinx Literatures (Ohio State University Press, 2022) studies comparatively periods and episodes in Black and Latinx literary histories to interpret the emergence of both literary traditions as a fight for social, cultural, and artistic recognition and how the writings of some post-1960s Black and Latinx authors challenged the marginalized position of their respective groups in part by appropriating and subverting elements from the larger American literary tradition.

His second book, Publishing Latinidad: Latinx Literary and Intellectual Production 1880-1960 (forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press in Spring 2025), examines Latinx writers and intellectuals prior to 1960 who entered literary, cultural, and intellectual discourses through alternative print cultures and genres, including nontraditional books, Spanish-language newspapers and periodicals, translations, paratexts, bibliographies, and pamphlets.

Professor Fernandez’s current research project focuses on the formation of the Latinx literary tradition through the acquisition, editorial practices, publication, and reception of past and contemporary Latinx texts produced by independent periodicals, journals, and book publishers, particularly Arte Público Press.

At the University of Iowa, he teaches LATS: 1700: Latina/o/x Literature in the U.S., LATS: 2280 Introduction to Latina/o/x Studies, LATS 3100: Latinx Community Engagement, and LATS: 3415 Latina/o/x Protests, Movement, Resistance.