Dr. Jesus Montaño
Assistant Professor

Interests
Latinx Literary and Cultural Studies
Children’s and Young Adult Literatures and Cultures
Shakespeare, Race, and Adaptation
Speculative Literature
Literature, Race, and Justice
Critical Borderlands Studies
Education
Ph.D. 1999. Ohio State University
M.A. 1996. Ohio State University
B.A. 1991. University of Texas at Austin
Bio
Jesus Montaño is a teacher/scholar of Latinx literatures and cultures, with special interest in children’s and young adult literary and cultural production in Our Americas. His teaching and research, in this way, examine the transformative and reparative power of writing and reading on young minds and spirits.
Tactics of Hope in Latinx Children’s and Young Adult Literature, his 2022 co-authored monograph (with Regan Postma-Montaño), elucidates the role of knowledge and awareness in countering pernicious oppressions that Latinx youth face. The beating heart of this project is that books and reading transform lives. With these restorative and reparative principles as the governing ideas, Tactics of Hope shows ways in which the imagination is utilized to better our world. Social justice is likewise the primary imperative in Jesus’s current book project, Young Latinx Shakespeares: Race, Justice, and Literary Appropriation (Palgrave Macmillan). Latinx literary transfigurations of Shakespeare open new terrains wherein to imagine new versions of self and of community. In this, they showcase the potent force inherent in putting together Shakespeare and Latinx to propel social justice initiatives and movements. Jesus’s program of study also includes articles and book chapters published, or soon to be published, in leading journals such as The Lion and the Unicorn and Children’s Literature Quarterly and books such as Liberating Shakespeare (Arden Shakespeare).
Jesus and his spouse, when they are not teaching or writing, spend their time raising Trixie, who they suspect is a chupacabra (the blood sucking creatures of Latinx legend). This explains the numerous wrecked shoes and the times she has provided students feedback on their papers by tearing into them, literally.