José F. Aranda, Jr. is an Associate Professor of Chicano/a and American Literature. He is the author of When We Arrive: A New Literary History of Mexican American (University of Arizona, 2003). He has written articles on early U.S. criticism, Nineteenth-Century Mexican American literature, the future of Chicano/a Studies, and most recently undertaken an investigation of the relationship between modernity and Mexican American writings, titled The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848-1960.

Dr. Aranda has a dual appointment in the departments of English and Spanish & Portuguese. He is a board member of Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. He is also the founder and director of the Américas Reseach Center of Rice University, a center devoted geographically to research, scholarship, and teaching that understands Houston, Texas as historically and globally tied to regions such as Mexico, the borderlands, the U.S. West, Latin America, the Caribbean, and especially the Gulf of Mexico. He is the Director of the Latin American Studies Major at Rice and co-founder of "Avanzamos: El Taller Chicana/o," an annual workshop focused on advanced scholarship in Chicana/o Studies, sponsored by Rice University and the University of North Texas.