Richard T. Rodríguez is a Professor of Media & Cultural Studies and English at the University of California, Riverside. He specializes in Latina/o/x literary and cultural studies, film and visual culture, and gender and sexuality studies, and holds additional interests in transnational cultural studies, popular music studies, and comparative ethnic studies. The author of Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 2009), which won the 2011 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award, and A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and U.S. Latinidad (Duke University Press, forthcoming), he is currently completing Undocumented Desires: Fantasies of Latino Male Sexuality. With Martin F. Manalansan IV, Chantal Nadeau, and Siobhan B. Somerville, he coedited a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies titled “Queering the Middle: Race, Region, and a Queer Midwest.” The 2019 recipient of the Richard A. Yarborough Mentoring Award, granted by the Minority Scholars' Committee of the American Studies Association, he is the co-principal investigator on a University of California MRPI grant titled "The Global Latinidades Project: Globalizing Latinx Studies for the Next Millennium." His show, "Dr. Ricky on the Radio," can be heard weekly on KUCR.

As part of the Global Latinidades Consortium, Rodríguez will explore Transatlantic Latinidades across a wide range of topics and themes, including popular musical fusions, transnational labor politics, and queer cultural politics.