Sandra Ruiz

Performance Studies, Puerto Rican Studies, Latinx Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Gender, Sexuality & Queer Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Continental Philosophy, Contemporary American Literature, Theatre Studies, Minoritarian Aesthetics

Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance (NYU Press, June 2019) investigates the relationship between Puerto Rican subjectivity, gender, sexuality, and revolutionary performance under colonial time. Ruiz argues that Ricanness—a continual performance of bodily endurance against US colonialism through different measures of time—uncovers what’s at stake politically for the often unwanted, anticolonial, racialized and sexualized enduring body. Moving among theatre, experimental video, revolutionary protest, photography, poetry, and durational performance art, Ricanness stages scenes in which the philosophical, social, and psychic come together at the site of aesthetics, against the colonization of time. Analyzing the work of artists and revolutionaries like ADÁL, Lebrón, Papo Colo, Pedro Pietri, and Ryan Rivera, Ricanness imagines a Rican future through the time travel extended in their aesthetic interventions, illustrating how they have reformulated time itself through nonlinear aesthetic practices.

The Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory Jr. Fellow, 2016-2018
IPRH Fellow, 2014-2015
UIUC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2012-2013
The Michael Kirby Memorial Prize for Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation, New York University, 2011

Graduate Seminar: Issues in Performance Studies
Graduate Seminar: Minoritarian Aesthetics
Grad/Undergrad: Brown and Black Existentialisms
Grad/Undergrad: Latinx Performance & Performance Studies
Grad/Undergrad: Latinx Dramatists from the 1960s to the Future
Undergraduate: Theories and Methods in Latina/o Studies

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