Erick John Rodriguez is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on studies of empire, notions of civility, civil war displacement, sexual sub-cultures, and the erotic in twentieth and twenty-first century global postcolonial and U.S. ethnic literatures. His work specifically centers Latina/o/x and Latin American social thought and practice under neoliberalism and its circulation on a global scale. Erick received his MA in English at UCSB and his BA in English Literature and Global Studies - emphasis in Latin American economy -- from the University of Arizona.

In his current role as Graduate Fellow for the American Cultures & Global Contexts Center (ACGCC), Erick is co-organizing a symposium on imagination and racial justice. Along with the ACGCC Director, he was awarded the 2022 Carsey Wolf Research Support Grant. He is currently serving as co-lead TA for the English Department and was a former research assistant for the Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative. Erick has taught introductory courses on literary studies and comparative ethnic literature and will be co-teaching a course on queer of color borderscapes this Spring.

For the Global Latinidades Project (GLP), Erick worked as a research assistant for a project on warfare and violence studies in Pan-American contexts. He specifically served as copy editor and indexer for B.V. Olguín’s Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature published by Oxford University Press in 2021.