From the border town of Brownsville, Texas, John Morán González is the J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor of American and English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He attended Princeton University, graduating magna cum laude with an A.B. in English literature in 1988. At Stanford University, he earned an M.A. degree in 1991, and a Ph.D. in 1998, both in English and American literature.

He has published in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Journal of Latino/Latin American Studies, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Symbolism, and Western American Literature. He is the author of two books: Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican-American Literature (2009), and The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels (2010). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o American Literature (2016). He is co-editor (with Laura Lomas) of The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature (2018), which was selected as a 2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. He is co-editor (with Vildan Mahmutoglu) of Communication of Migration in Media and Arts (2020). He co-edited, with Sonia Hernández, the critical anthology Reverberations of Racial Violence: Critical Reflections on the History of the Border (2021).

González is a founding member of Refusing to Forget (RTF), a non-profit public history project dedicated to critically memorializing state violence in the South Texas borderlands, 1910-1920. Founded in 2014, RTF has been recognized as a leader in the field of public memory studies and activism with public history awards from the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Western History Association. A former director of the UT Austin Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS), González currently serves on the Board of Directors for Humanities Texas and on the Board of Directors for the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project.

What do you like most about teaching arts/humanities?

The arts and humanities act as mirrors to ourselves and to our societies, in whose reflections we can critically perceive ourselves in ways obscured by our everyday ways of seeing. The arts and humanities surprise us, jarring us out of our complacencies and troubling our comfort zones. Yes, we can and do turn to the arts and humanities for solace, affirmation, and wisdom, but they always move us to think critically. I cherish teaching the arts and humanities because they lead us to our better selves.

What advice do you have for graduate students in your field? 

Be patient with yourself, and know that every one of your fellow graduate students has the same anxieties about impostor syndrome that you have. Find good mentors, who can be more advanced graduate students as well as faculty members. Their advice will be invaluable in navigating the treacherous currents of academia. Know why you are in graduate school. Writing the dissertation will be one of the hardest things you will ever do, so gird yourself for the undertaking and surround yourself with people who support you. Know that what you do in graduate school matters. You are not just laying the foundation for your scholarly contributions; you are already a role model and inspiration for lives you may not know you’ve influenced. Have a six-year plan, and work backwards from whatever goals you hope to accomplish during that time. Then make it happen.

What projects are you working on at this moment? 

 My main projects at the moment are co-editing, with Laura Lomas, the three-volume “Latinx Literature in Transition” series from Cambridge University Press, which highlights how Latinx literary studies is responding to current critical trends. Working on providing accurate and factual counter-narratives to the 2023 Texas Ranger bicentennial through the Refusing to Forget public history project (www.refusingtoforget.org). We’re putting out a Twitter campaign called “On this Day” #OTD that puts out corrective information about the Rangers’ role in policing communities of color in Texas. We also are supporting the exhibit “Life and Death on the Border, 1910-1920” at several venues throughout Texas during 2023.