Juan Rodriguez

Dr. Rodríguez is Associate Professor of Spanish at Georgia Tech and co-editor of the collection of essays New Documentaries in Latin America (Palgrave, 2014). He is also co-editing a book series, Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, for the University Press of Florida.

His current book project, Cinematic Ruinologies: Cuba, Documentary and the Ambiguous Rhetoric of Decay, explores representations of space and place in documentaries made in Cuba. The first part of the project is an analysis of various documentaries on ruins made by Cuban and international filmmakers after the collapse of the Soviet Union and during the Special Period. Rodríguez argues that the projection of images of debris and urban decay in documentaries constitutes an ambiguous rhetoric. Cuban ruins not only evoke the frustrations of Cuban people, the vulnerable situation of historical emblems or the limits of revolutionary discourse but also a social desire for change. The second part of the project consists of a study of the semiotic, institutional, and technoscientific implications of the fungal contamination of film documentaries made in the 1970s. Through the concept of film micology, Rodríguez investigates the consequences of the biodeterioration of Cuban films stored in ICAIC (the Cuban Film Institute) to highlight that performing film archival research in the 21st century, in the age of digital technologies, is another form of ruinology.

Professor Rodríguez is a Latin American film scholar whose research focuses on the representation of Latin American cities in documentary. He studies how Latin American documentaries represent contemporary urban issues such as housing problems, transportation dynamics, water resources, economic development, and social movements. For Rodríguez, documentary is an audiovisual discourse that opens the possibility to examine urban imaginaries, which in turn reveal the ways city dwellers perceive, experience, and transform their cities. Many documentaries offer ways of imagining the city that either overlap with or challenge some of the “mental mappings ” and “interpretive grids” developed by dwellers, visitors, and tourists when exploring different urban realities. Viewers can infer and reconstruct an imaginary map of the city each time a documentary gives shape to the navigation of the physical city and to the routes, itineraries, and actions of city dwellers. In his publications, Rodríguez explores documentaries as moving maps and embodied cartographies of contemporary urban issues.

He completed his doctorate at Duke University's Literature Program, where he also earned a certificate in Latin American Studies. His research areas include documentary studies, sustainability, critical theory, urban studies, and digital humanities. His articles have appeared in The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Latin American Perspectives, Revista Iberoamericana, Revista Pensamiento de los Confines, Debats, Journal of Sport History, and La Habana Elegante. He has published chapters in various books, including Miradas al margen: Cine y subalternidad en América Latina y el Caribe, ed. Luis Duno-Gottberg (Caracas: Fundación Cinemateca Nacional, 2009); Poéticas de José María Lima: Tradición y sorpresa, ed. Áurea María Sotomayor (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Latinoamericana, 2012); Redes hipertextuales en el aula: Claves y conceptos, ed. José Manuel de Amo, Osvaldo Cleger and Antonio Mendoza (Barcelona: Editorial Octaedro, 2015); and Sports and Nationalism in Latin America, ed. Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste, Robert Irwin, and Juan Poblete (forthcoming in Palgrave).  He has taught courses on Latin American cities, Spanish Service Learning, Globalization in Latin America, Latin American documentaries, Science Fiction from Latin America and Latin American music. At the School of Modern Languages, Dr. Rodríguez has participated in the organization of various events, including the symposium on Latin American Media Studies in the Age of Digital Humanities.