Ben Valdez Olguín is the Robert and Liisa Erickson Presidential Chair in English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. in 1996, and M.A. in 1992 from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University. His B.A., with Honors, is from the Department of Hispanic and Classical Languages, and Honors College, at the University of Houston, where his maternal grandfather had worked as a custodian in the same building where Olguín took political science courses. He also studied abroad in London and Mexico City. Olguín is a recipient of a Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Research Award, and numerous other awards and distinctions. He has served on the faculty in the English departments at Cornell University and the University of Texas at San Antonio, with visiting appointments in the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Olguín’s interdisciplinary areas of expertise include Chicanx and Latinx Literary and Cultural Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, American and Latin American Studies, Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, Speculative literature and film, Human Rights theory and praxis, the Medical Humanities, and Creative Writing. His research, writing, teaching, and service activities explore the complex relationships between vernacular culture and performances of power and counter-power in local, transnational, cross-border, and hemispheric venues. He pursues this inquiry through interdisciplinary diachronic studies of institutions and social contexts where intersecting and often conflicting cultures, identities, and ideologies are negotiated through literature, performance, and visual expression.

In addition to publications in a variety of academic and creative writing venues ranging from Cultural Critique, American Literary History, Aztlán, Frontiers, and Callaloo, Olguín is the author of two academic books: La Pinta: Chicana/o History, Culture, and Politics (University of Texas Press, 2010), and Violentologies: Violence and Ontology in Latinx Literature (Oxford University Press, 2021). He is a co-editor with Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez of the anthology, Latina/os and WWII: Mobility, Agency, and Ideology (University of Texas Press, 2014), and also a co-editor with Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson of the anthology, Altermundos: Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (University of Washington Press, 2017), which won a 2018 American Book Award.

Olguín is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop, founded by Sandra Cisneros, and has authored two collections of poetry. His first poetry book, Red Leather Gloves (Hansen Publishing, 2014), is about his brief career as a teenage amateur boxer in Houston, Texas. His second poetry collection, At the Risk of Seeming Ridiculous: Poems from Cuba Libre (Aztlán Libre Press, 2014), is based on his decades-long experiences as a member of the Venceremos Brigade, which travels to Cuba annually to engage in people-to-people diplomacy, educational exchanges, and volunteer labor in support of the Cuban Revolution. Olguín currently is working on a third collection of poetry based on his experiences as a volunteer paramedic titled, Pericardial Tamponade, Or This is How You Die. Other works in progress include a collection of speculative short stories, Mountain Time; and a trilogy of travel writing testimonial essays, Desde Abajo/From Below: Localized Globalities & Cultural Critique in the Post-American Century.

Olguín’s research and teaching are integrated into community service and civic engagement activities across a range of initiatives. These include service-learning projects in community centers and schools in underserved communities, as well as in prisons, juvenile jails, and immigrant detention centers. As founder and director of the Global Latinidades Center, Olguín has received over $2.1 million in grants, which help support multiple educational and community-based initiatives. These include partnerships with the Santa Barbara Immigrant Legal Defense Center. Through his endowment funds and grants he funds student internships designed to bridge the town-gown divide by encouraging students to use their professional skills to serve communities in need.

He also has joined in partnership with Morehouse College, Spelman College, and Texas Southern University through the AfroLatinidades Institute, which focuses on the recovery, analysis, and reclamation of the African roots of Latinx culture, history and politics. The goal of this four-campus partnership is to increase the number of Black students in graduate programs throughout the University of California System’s ten campuses. We currently are recruiting students from these three HBCUs to attend a year-long research internship that includes a six-week summer quarter at UCSB from June 20 to July 29, 2022. (For information contact Professor Leah Creque or Professor Alison Ligon.)