Dr. Jesus Montaño

Interests

Latinx Literary and Cultural Studies

Youth Literatures 

Shakespeare and Adaptation

Speculative Literature 

Latinx and Indigenous Environmentalisms 

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 scholar of Latinx literatures and cultures, with a particular passion for children’s and young adult books that imagine better worlds—and help build them. His research explores how storytelling can be a form of resistance, healing, and transformation, especially young readers navigating complex identities, histories, and futures. His work focuses on Latinx children’s and young adult literature, where imagination engages resistance and books become blueprints for hope.

He is the co-author of Tactics of Hope in Latinx Children’s and Young Adult Literature (2022), a book that argues literature is not just for learning, it is for surviving, dreaming, and thriving. His second book, Young Latinx Shakespeares: Race, Justice, and Literary Appropriation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), explores how Latinx writers creatively rework Shakespeare to open up new cultural and literary spaces. These adaptations are radical acts of reimagining what literature can do and who it is for.

His current project, Magical Environmentalisms: The Cultivation of Ecojustice Knowledges and Practices in Latinx & Indigenous Speculative Youth Literature (under contract, The Ohio State University Press), dives into the world of Latinx and Indigenous speculative youth literature, where ecojustice, activism, and enchantment converge. These stories invite young readers into magical landscapes that challenge environmental destruction and human exploitation, offering visions of more just, interconnected futures.

Jesus’s work appears in journals like The Lion and the Unicorn and Children’s Literature Quarterly, and in edited volumes on Shakespeare, Latinx YA literature, and youth speculative literature in the Anthropocene. Whether he is writing about literary appropriation or magical ecosystems, his scholarship is rooted in the belief that young people—and the stories that they read—can change the world.

When not teaching, writing, or reading something with footnotes, Jesus and his spouse are busy raising Trixie, a dog with a suspicious appetite for shoes and student papers. They suspect she may be a chupacabra in disguise, but she is family, so they have made peace with the occasional chewed-up manuscript.