Jason Ruiz

ILS Director

Jason Ruiz is the director of the Institute for Latino Studies and is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is also affiliated faculty with the Program in Gender Studies. He teaches courses in Latinx studies, race and representation, queer studies, and popular culture. He is the author of Americans in the Treasure House: Travel to Porfirian Mexico and the Cultural Politics of Empire and Narcomedia: Latinidad, Popular Culture, and America’s War on Drugs (both from the University of Texas Press, 2014 and 2023, respectively). He is also the principal investigator of Latinx Murals of Pilsen, a digital research project devoted to public art in Chicago supported by the Whiting Foundation. Ruiz is a 2016 recipient of the Edmund P. Joyce Award and 2019 Charles B. Sheedy Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at Notre Dame.