Dylan Rodríguez is Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (2001), and earned two B.A. degrees and a Concentration degree from Cornell University (1995).

Professor Rodríguez is the author of two books: Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).  Prof. Rodríguez was nationally recognized by Diverse as an Emerging Scholar of 2006, and he has been a Ford Foundation Predoctoral and Postdoctoral Fellow.

A central concern animates Professor Rodriguez’s work:  how do the historical logics of racial genocide permeate our most familiar systems of state violence, cultural production, institutionalized knowledge, liberation struggle, and social identity?  How do ordinary people (including scholars) inhabit racial genocide—make sense of it, narrate it, suffer it, and revolt against it?  Professor Rodríguez’s most recent and current thinking examines how the genocidal and proto-genocidal logics of social liquidation, cultural extermination, physiological evisceration, and racist terror become normalized features of everyday life in different historical periods, up to and including the “post-civil rights” and “post-racial” moments.

Professor Rodríguez is a founding member of Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, and he has worked in or alongside various social movements and activist collectives.  Embracing the responsibilities and obligations of a public intellectual practice, he has appeared in numerous media venues, including radio programs in Los Angeles, the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area, Montreal, and Santa Barbara. Professor Rodríguez’s scholarly writing has appeared in wide cross-section of academic venues, including Radical History Review; Social Identities; Critical Sociology; The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies; Social Justice; Political Power and Social Theory; and Scholar & Feminist Online.  He has contributed chapters to anthologies such as The State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States (Stanford University Press, 2011), Corpus: An Interdisciplinary Reader on Bodies and Knowledge (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), The Violence of Incarceration (Routledge, 2008), Warfare in the American Homeland (Duke University Press, 2007), Positively No Filipinos Allowed (Temple University Press, 2006), and What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation (South End Press, 2007).

An active manuscript reviewer and peer evaluator for journals and university presses alike, Professor Rodríguez has served as an Associate Editor of Radical Philosophy Review and American Quarterly, and he sits on the editorial boards of numerous other academic journals, including Social Justice and the flagship journal of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association.