Salvador Vidal-Ortiz
Professor of Sociology
EDUCATION:
PhD The Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York
MA California State University – Humboldt
BA Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras
BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT:
Salvador Vidal-Ortiz is Professor of Sociology and holds a joint appointment with El Instituto: Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies. Prior to joining UConn, Dr. Vidal-Ortiz held a tenured position at American University, in Washington, DC. His scholarship mainly addresses questions of racialization, gender, and sexuality across the human social sciences and the humanities in the United States, Puerto Rico, and the rest of the Américas; he has expanded to research on body and embodiment, (im)migration, minoritized groups in education, and race and media. He continues to collaborate in projects to better understand the experiences of students and faculty of color in academia, while expanding on analyses of Whiteness as structure. Besides several co-authored and edited award-winning books and guest editing journal special issues, he has published numerous peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and invited essays; his research has appeared in journals such as Sociological Forum, Qualitative Sociology, Symbolic Interaction, Gender & Society, Sociology Compass, Latino Studies and Gender, Work and Organizations.
Empirically, his research has taken place in U.S. settings (the NYC/Miami religious-cultural practice of Afro-Cuban Santería, and its practitioners; San Francisco, with trans men’s masculinity experiences) and in Latin America (internal displacement in Colombia; trans education in Argentina). Professor Vidal-Ortiz utilizes qualitative data collection techniques (observation, interviews, focus groups, oral histories, archives) to produce social analysis – for instance, he has helped build online archives and publish work based on analysis of archives, personal narratives, and oral histories (in both English and Spanish).
Teaching-wise, he focuses on Puerto Rican/Latinx Studies, intersectionality, qualitative methods, social movements, and gender, sexuality, and migration. A U.S.-trained Latina/o studies scholar, he broadened his research to Latin American studies, currently collaborating with the Grupo de Trabajo Feminista y Queer de las Américas (or the Cuir/Queer Américas Working Group), which seeks to shift power in knowledge production and circulation to and from the Américas. Its recent project was the trilingual publication (in Argentina, Brazil, and the U.S.) of a special issue entitled: Cuir/Queer Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable (2021).
Professor Vidal-Ortiz was an elected officer (Chair or Council member) for the American Sociological Association’s Race and Ethnic Minorities section, Sexualities section, and currently Chair of the Latina/o Sociology section; he helped establish the Body and Embodiment section as its first non-elected Chair. Some of the ASA committees he has served in include the Distinguished Scholarly Book Award Selection Committee and the Dissertation Award Selection Committee.
VISITING ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS:
Distinguished Visiting Scholar, College of Arts and Sciences, University at Buffalo (2023)
Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence, Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies program, College of the Holy Cross (2019)
Invited Professor, Universidade Federal do Amapá (MA in Education) and Universidad do Estado do Amapá (Pedagogy Studies), Macapá, Brazil (2019)
Faculty-in-Residence Summer Teaching (FIRST) Program. Department of Sociology, University of Colorado – Boulder (2012, 2013)
Invited Professor, Social Sciences – Graduate Program Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia (2013)
Invited Professor, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Cultural Studies, Bogotá, Colombia (2011)
RECENT PUBLICATIONS:
Busch, Emma & Salvador Vidal-Ortiz. 2024. “ENLACE: Latina/o gay and lesbian ruptures in the Archives.” Latino Studies 22, 1: 196-215.
Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador. 2023. “A Queer of Color Critique for Sociology: The mutual constitution of race and sexuality.” Pp. 203-220 in Disciplinary Futures: Sociology in Conversation with American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies, edited by Nadia Kim and Pawan Dhingra. NY: NYU Press.
Ruiz-Junco, Natalia & Salvador Vidal-Ortiz. 2023. “W.E.B. Du Bois as interactionist: Reflections on the canonical incorporation of a marginalized scholar.” Symbolic Interaction 46, 3: 332-348.
Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador & Juliana Martínez. 2023. “From rage to love: Travesti-centred education in Argentina.” Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning 23, 3: 263-270.
Moussawi, Ghassan & Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador. 2020. “A Queer Sociology: On Power, Race, and Decentering Whiteness.” Sociological Forum 35, 4: 1272-1289.
Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador, Brandon Andrew Robinson and Cristina Khan. 2018. Race and Sexuality. Cambridge, UK & Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador & Juliana Martínez. 2018. “Latinx Thoughts: Latinidad with an X.” Latino Studies 16, 3: 384-395.
Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador. 2016. “Sofía Vergara: on media representations of Latinidad.” Pp. 85-99 in Race and Contention in Twenty-first Century U.S. Media, Jason Smith and Bhoomi K. Thakore, (eds). Routledge Transformations in Race and Media Series. Routledge.
Quesada, Uriel, Letitia Gómez, Salvador Vidal-Ortiz (eds.). 2015. Queer Brown Voices: personal narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
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