RAMÓN E. SOTO-CRESPO is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He served as Director of the Latino Studies Program at The State University of New York at Buffalo from 2002 to 2012.  He was awarded the Lorraine Lawton Prize for Excellence in Comparative Literature and the award for Excellence in History. He is the author of Mainland Passage: The Cultural Anomaly of Puerto Rico (2009), which won honorable mention at the 2009 Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latino and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies, and most recently The White Trash Menace and Hemispheric Fiction (2020).  He currently serves as co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature.  His new book Neobugarrón: Latin/o American Sexual Practice in the Age of Neoliberalism is forthcoming (Fall 2023).

His essays have appeared in peer-reviewed academic journals such as American Literary History, Atlantic Studies, Modern Language Notes, Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, and Textual Practice.  And, in edited collections such as Archipelagic American Studies (Duke UP), Porn Archives (Duke UP), and Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (U of Chicago P).

Soto-Crespo's research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Ford Foundation, the University of Wisconsin Institute on Race and Ethnicity, the Schomburg Foundation, Dr. Nuala McGann Drescher Research Fellowship, the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, the UB Humanities Institute, and the UIUC Humanities Research Institute.