Miguel Domínguez Rohan

Miguel Domínguez Rohan is a scholar of 20th and 21st-century Mexican literature and culture with ten years of experience teaching cultural, content-based Spanish and Latin American literature and film courses. His research focuses on the intersections of (ir)rationality, disability, and non-normative worldviews with intellectual and artistic practice. He works with literary archives, periodicals, and literary magazines to uncover non-canonical intellectual networks based on personal and intellectual affinities in Mexico and beyond.

His book, El ojo envenenado: México y el surrealismo 1924-1938 / The Poisoned Eye: Mexico and Surrealism (El Colegio de San Luis, 2015), traces the debates concerning the aesthetic and ethical implications of the avant-garde, especially surrealism, in Mexican periodicals and literary magazines. He reveals the unclaimed legacy of positivism in early 20th-century Mexican culture and politics that conditioned artists’ and writers’ relationships with historical avant-garde’s theories and forms, ranging from cautious acceptance to, at times, contentious debate.

His current monograph (in progress) analyzes the work of Mexican writer Juan García Ponce (1932-2003) and the relationship between intellectual work, disability, and trauma. As a survivor of multiple sclerosis for almost half of his life, García Ponce developed a critical relationship with the literary practice while contending with the experience of disease and disability, revealed through careful consideration of the full scope of his literary works, correspondence, and other personal documents. Combining archival research and Disability Studies, Miguel Domínguez Rohan expands the focus of the current historiography of the literature of Mexico by contextualizing García Ponce’s physical experience of degenerative disease within increasingly violent and neoliberal Mexican state politics during the late twentieth century. Domínguez Rohan renders García Ponce’s collective and assisted practice of literature as a form of therapeutic method for both personal and political survival.