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Geovani Ramírez

Geovani Ramírez, Assistant Professor

Geovani Ramírez, Assistant Professor
Geovani Ramírez, Assistant Professor
Curriculum Vitae

Department of English
423 Shanks Hall 
180 Turner Street, NW 
Blacksburg, VA 24061
geovanir@vt.edu

Geovani Ramírez is an Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies and Literature in the Department of English, where he specializes in health and environmental humanities scholarship. His current book project, The Burning Question of Labor, explores the ways Mexican-heritage women writers use the topic of labor in their works to interrogate and re-shape notions of class, race, gender, culture, (trans)national identities, and citizenship. Employing ecocritical and disability studies lenses as well as ecofeminist theory, his book project reveals the essential role Mexican-heritage women have played in offering conceptual frameworks for understanding Mexican-heritage people’s relationships to labor and laboring spaces, the environment, and health.

Geovani's work has appeared in such venues as Berkeley Press' Ethnic Studies Review, Latinx Talk, and Intersectionality: Understanding Women’s Lives and Resistance in the Past and Present. Geovani’s public-facing, transdisciplinary approach toward the study of Latinx populations is manifested in “Chicken Doctors and the Trials of Transcendence: Unveiling Gallinera/o Illness Narratives.” “Chicken Doctors” is a multi-genre, autoethnographic piece that engages with medical anthropological scholarship to explore the intersections between Latina/o labor, legislation, and health.

Geovani is additionally working on a companion piece to "Chicken Doctors" that focuses specifically on Latina gallineras, or poultry workers, as well as an article that offers an analysis of Karen Zacarías’s play Native Gardens to consider the ecological, as well as sociopolitical, impacts of large Latina/o migrations to the U.S. suburbs.

  • Latinx studies and literature
  • Environmental humanities
  • Medical/health humanities
  • Ph.D., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 
  • M.A., North Carolina State University
  • B.A., The University of North Carolina at Wilmington (summa cum laude)
  • Member, Committee for establishment of Latinx and Latin American Studies Minor Member
  • English M.A. Committee
  • Humanities Associate Faculty Member, Virginia Tech Center for Humanities. 2023-2024. 
  • Orgullo Award for Service, Scholarship, Leadership, and Advocacy, UNC-Chapel Hill Carolina Latinx Center. Spring 2022. 
  • The Order of the Golden Fleece Honor Society (oldest and highest honorary society at UNC), UNC-Chapel Hill. Argonaut number: 2240. Spring 2022 (induction). 
  • J. Lee Greene Dissertation Award for excellence in Postgraduate Work on Race and Ethnicity, UNC-Chapel Hill. Spring 2020. 
  • University Diversity Award, UNC-Chapel Hill. Spring 2020. Frank Porter Graham Honor Society, UNC-Chapel Hill. Spring 2020 (induction).
  • Critical Ethnic Studies Graduate Working Group Fellowship, UNC-Chapel Hill. Spring 2020.
  • Center for the Study of the American South Summer Research Fellow, UNC-Chapel Hill. Spring 2019. 
  • Lea/McLaurin Dissertation Completion Fellowship, UNC-Chapel Hill. Spring 2018.
  • George Hills Harper Summer Research Fellowship, UNC-Chapel Hill. Summer 2013.  
  • Phi Kappa Phi Honors Society (“The nation’s oldest and most selective multidisciplinary collegiate honor society”), North Carolina State University. Spring 2012 (induction).

Journal Articles

  • “Black Latina Passages through Colonial Ecologies of Illness and the Art of Composting Aesthetics.” Ethnic Studies Review (UC Berkeley Press). (Accepted & Forthcoming).
  • “Chicken Doctors and the Trials of Transcendence: Unveiling Gallinera/o Illness Narratives.” Ethnic Studies Review, 44 (2): 65-100, 2021.
  • “LatinAsian and Black Latinx Migrations in Literature.” Latinx Talk, March 2020 Special Series on Latinx Migration Literature, 2020.

Book Chapters

“Ruiz de Burton’s Inviolable Californios and Roguish Anglos in The Squatter and the Don and Who Would Have Thought It.” In Intersectionality: Understanding Women’s Lives and Resistance in the Past and Present (2020), ed. Lori J. Underwood and Dawn L. Hutchinson. Lexington Books of Rowman & Littlefield, 66-78.

  • Juneteenth Fellowship, Virginia Tech. Summer 2023. 
  • New Faculty Mentoring Grant, Virginia Tech. Spring 2023. 
  • Critical Ethnic Studies Graduate Working Group Fellowship, UNC-Chapel Hill. Spring 2020. 
  • Center for the Study of the American South Summer Research Fellow, UNC-Chapel Hill. Spring 2019. 
  • Lea/McLaurin Dissertation Completion Fellowship, UNC-Chapel Hill. Spring 2018. 
  • George Hills Harper Summer Research Fellowship, UNC-Chapel Hill. Summer 2013.

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