Pronouns: He/him/his

• PhD, MA, English, Rutgers University
• MA, English, Pennsylvania State University
• BA, Comparative Literature, Swarthmore College

Octavio R. González is a 2021-22 UB Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholar and an associate professor of English and creative writing at Wellesley College. His first monograph, Misfit Modernism: Queer Forms of Double Exile in the Twentieth-Century Novel (2020), analyzes novels that narrate modernist alienation keyed to minoritarian feelings of double exile. Other scholarship appears in Modern Fiction Studies, Cultural Critique, Ariel, American Literature in Transition, RAW, ASAP/Journal, GLQ, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia. His first poetry collection, The Book of Ours, was a selection of Letras Latinas at the University of Notre Dame (Momotombo Press, 2009). He is currently at work on a second book of poems, “Limerence: The Wingless Hour”; an ekphrastic memoir; and his second monograph, “AIDS Panic Icons,” on the successive moral panics and their homophobic iconography which have defined the “epidemic of signification” regarding HIV/AIDS from 1981 to the present. Prior to graduate school, González worked in AIDS research.

• Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Postdoctoral Fellowship
• Newhouse Institute for the Humanities Fellowship
• Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Summer Research Fellowship Prize
• Presidential Fellowship, Rutgers University
• Emerging Writers Retreat Fellowship, Lambda Literary
• Oscar Wilde Poetry Award, Finalist, Gival Press

Transatlantic literary Modernism, including the Harlem Renaissance; the twentieth-century novel; narrative theory and intertextuality; psychoanalysis; queer theory and queer-of-color critique; modern and contemporary U.S. lesbian and gay literature and culture; the cultural matrix of representations of HIV/AIDS, including subcultures of risk.