Ralph Cintron
Professor Emeritus
English; Latin American and Latino Studies
Contact
Building & Room:
2012 UH
Address:
601 S Morgan St.
Office Phone:
Email:
About
Bio
Ralph Cintrón holds a joint appointment in the Latino and Latin American Studies Program. His research and teaching interests are in rhetorical studies; ethnography, particularly urban ethnography; urban theory; theories of globalization; political theory, particularly the anthropology of democracy; and social theory. He is on the Executive Board of the Rhetoric Society of America. Research wise, he is currently participating in a multi-disciplinary, ethnographic study of specific Puerto Rican and Mexican neighborhoods in Chicago. After completing fieldwork, the study will become a jointly authored book. Much of his fieldwork occurs in an alderman's office, but the larger project focuses upon labor and housing issues, the transnational political and economic forces that underpin these communities, and the evolution of political ideology. He is also associated with UIC's International Center for the Study of Human Responses to Social Catastrophe. In association with the Center, he has done fieldwork in Kosova and co-authored essays on humanitarian interventionism and international state-building. In addition, he is associated with the International Rhetoric Culture Project, which brings anthropologists and rhetoricians together, at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. He is scheduled to be a co-editor for a forthcoming volume on politics. He is also producing a single-authored book that theoretically and ethnographically critiques a few of the key topoi of democracy (transparency, equality, freedom, rights) in order to explore the ruses of liberalism. He is a former Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, and one of his books, Angels' Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday, won honourable mention for the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing from the American Anthropological Association.
Research Areas
Composition | Critical Theory | Environmental Humanities |Ethnographic research | Interdisciplinary Economic Theory /Political Economy | Latinx Studies | Postcolonial Studies | Rhetoric | Urban Studies