Geovani Ramirez

Geovani Ramírez received his Ph.D. in English, with an emphasis on Multiethnic and Latinx literature, from UNC Chapel Hill’s Department of English and Comparative Literature in May of 2020. During the 2020-2021 academic year, Geovani will remain with the UNC English department as a postdoctoral fellow where he will be teaching courses in Latinx Studies and literature, including ENGL 164 Introduction to Latina/o Studies and ENGL 359 Latina Ecofeminism and Disability in Visual Art, Film, and Literature. His dissertation, which received the J. Lee Greene Award for excellence in Postgraduate Work on Race and Ethnicity, explores the ways Mexican-heritage women writers mobilize the topic of labor in their works to interrogate and re-shape notions of class, race, gender, culture, (trans)national identities, and citizenship. Through employing ecocritical and disability studies lenses as well as ecofeminist theory, his dissertation reveals the essential role Mexican-heritage women have played in offering conceptual frameworks for understanding Mexican-heritage people’s relationships to labor and laboring spaces, the environment, and health.

During his work with the Critical Ethnic Studies Graduate Working Group, Geovani workshopped a creative nonfiction autoethnographic piece entitled “Chicken Doctors: Work and Illness in the Lives of Immigrant Gallineros,” which offers glimpses into the strenuous working conditions of chicken workers and considers the acute and chronic health hazards of such labor. As importantly, in his autoethnography, Geovani discusses and reflects on the ways in which the chicken workers transcend their working conditions and cope with illness.