Jorge Santos, PhD

Jorge Santos, PhD

Associate Professor, Department of English, College of the Holy Cross

About

Jorge Santos is an award-winning scholar of comics and multiethnic literatures of the United States. He has worked at the College of the Holy Cross since 2014, first as an assistant professor and since 2020 as an associate professor.

His fields include Latina/o/x literature, Asian American literature, Multiethnic Literatures of the United States (MELUS), immigrant/migrant literature, ethnic studies, American cultural studies, composition (particularly English Language Learner pedagogy), and comic studies.

degrees

PhD, University of Connecticut
Department of English, 2014
Storrs, CT

MA, Texas Southern University
Department of English, 2008
Houston, TX

BA, Sam Houston State
Department of English, 2003
Huntsville, TX

FIRST BOOK

Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: Reframing History with Comics
University of Texas Press, 2019

Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement explores how graphic narrative theoretical approaches interrogate and illuminate the narrative strategies employed by graphic novels and memoirs pushing against the confines of our “consensus memory” of the civil rights movement. Of specific interest to my first book is the growing corpus of graphic novels and memoirs that reflect on what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall refers to as the “classical era” of the civil rights movement (the mid-1950s to 1968). Graphic Memories specifically investigates graphic novels and memoirs published in the mid-1990s to the present moment that challenge or expand this consensus narrative in order to include sites, actors, or people groups normally not included in the popular narrative of civil rights.

SECOND BOOK (FORTHCOMING)

Visualizing Vietnam: The Comics of Conflicted Post-Memories
Awarded an advance contract from The Ohio State University Press, May 2020

Visualizing Vietnam: The Comics of Conflicted Post-Memories will delineate how comics and graphic novels function as a rich site of conflicting cultural memory, spanning a diverse array of authors, genres, and perspectives on the war. Despite the extensive archive and studies focused on the visual dimensions of the Vietnam War, from newscasts to film and television, no book-length study exists focused on the role of graphic narratives, despite the existence dozens of graphic novels, hundreds of individual comics, graphic novels, and innumerable editorial cartoons on the subject. Visualizing the Vietnam War: The Comics of Conflicted Postmemories will begin to fill that gap.

EDITED COLLECTION (FORTHCOMING)

Out of the Gutters: Comics and Obscenity (co-edited with Patrick Lawrence)
Awarded an advance contract from University of Texas Press, Summer 2022

The essays in Out of the Gutters: Comics and Obscenity will probe the historical moment in the mid-twentieth century when, significantly, comics began to come into the mainstream and more liberal obscenity standards were established by the Supreme Court. They will undertake the important work of theorizing the unique ramifications of obscenity in comics, which blend literary
modes whose impacts on readers are usually treated as somehow distinct from each other. They will also carefully explore how categories of gender, race, and ability—and their attendant hierarchies of power and access—are inflected by the particularities of the comics medium and the pushing of the bounds of taboo.

articles and book chapters in print

• “Talented Tensions and Revisions: The Narrative Double Consciousness of Miles Morales.” Mixed-Race Superheroes, edited by Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins and Eric L. Berlatsky, Rutgers University Press, 2021.
• “Critical Impulses in Daniel Parada’s Zotz: A Case Study in Indigenous Comics.” Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, University of Arizona Press, 2020, pp. 181-196.
• “LatinX-Men: Logan’s Undocumented Voices Speak.” Latinx Ciné in the 21^st Century, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, University of Arizona Press, 2019, pp. 299-311.
• “Christian Conversion to the Model Minority in John Okada’s No-No Boy.” College Literature, vol. 46, no. 2, 2019, pp. 371-393.
• “‘To Look – Really Look.’ Photo-Graphic Narrative in Lila Quintero Weaver’s Darkroom,” Redrawing the Historical Past: History, Memory, and Multiethnic Graphic Novels, edited by Martha J. Cutter and Cathy Schlund-Vials, University of Georgia Press, 2018, pp. 129-156.
• “Multi-hyphenated identities on the road”: An Interview with Cristina García. MELUS, vol. 41, no 2, 2016, pp. 202-212.
• “Ambulatory Identities: Montijo’s Revision of Chicano/a Hybridity in Pablo’s Inferno.”  ImageTexT, vol. 8, no. 3, 2015.

AWARDS AND HONORS

Charles Hatfield Book Prize, 2019
From the Comic Studies Society for Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: Reframing History in Comics (UT Press, 2019)

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles, 2019
For Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: Reframing History in Comics (UT Press, 2019)

Best Online Comics Studies Scholarship Finalist, 2016
For “Ambulatory Identities: Montijo’s Revision of Chicano/a Hybridity in Pablo’s Inferno”

First Place, Aetna Critical Writing Prize, 2013 For “Movement through the Borderlands and Graphic Revisions in Rhode Montijo’s Pablo’s Inferno”

additional experience

Journal Reviewer
Inks: The Journal of the Comics Study Society; Studies of American Fiction; Criticism; Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory; La Revista de Estudios Hispánicos; SANE: Sequential Art Narratives in Education; Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures; Routledge Press

Assistant Director, Writing Center
University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, 2010-2012

English as a Second Language Educator
Neighborhood Centers INC, Houston, TX, 2007-2008