Juan Carlos Rodríguez

Associate Professor of Spanish

Member Of:
  • School of Modern Languages
Office Phone: 404-385-7251
Office Location: Swann 313
Related Links:

Overview

Juan Carlos Rodríguez (Ph.D., Program in Literature, Duke University, 2007) is Associate Professor of Spanish at Georgia Tech, co-director of the Atlanta Global Studies Center, and co-editor of the collections of essays New Documentaries in Latin America (Palgrave, 2014) and Digital Humanities in Latin America (University Press of Florida, 2020). He is also co-editing a book series, Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, for the University of Florida Press. His research focuses on Latin American documentaries from perspectives informed by sustainability, critical theory, urban and environmental studies, and digital humanities. As an educator and scholar, Rodríguez has a strong record of community engagement. He is the founding director of Georgia Tech’s Global Media Festival: Sustainability Across Languages and Cultures. His public digital humanities project Vieques Struggle: A Digital Video Archive, is a collection of video interviews that tells the story of demilitarization in the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico. Using materials from the Vieques Struggle project, he just completed his first long feature documentary, Vieques: A Living Archive, which covers the history of Vieques before and after the departure of the US Navy from the island in 2003.

Professor Rodríguez is a Latin American film scholar whose research focuses on the representation of Latin American cities in documentary. He studies how Latin American documentaries represent contemporary urban issues such as housing problems, transportation dynamics, water resources, economic development, and social movements. For Rodríguez, documentary is an audiovisual discourse that opens the possibility to examine urban imaginaries, which in turn reveal the ways city dwellers perceive, experience, and transform their cities. Many documentaries offer ways of imagining the city that either overlap with or challenge some of the “mental mappings ” and “interpretive grids” developed by dwellers, visitors, and tourists when exploring different urban realities. Viewers can infer and reconstruct an imaginary map of the city each time a documentary gives shape to the navigation of the physical city and to the routes, itineraries, and actions of city dwellers. In his publications, Rodríguez explores documentaries as moving maps and embodied cartographies of contemporary urban issues.

His articles have appeared in The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Latin American Perspectives, Revista Iberoamericana, Revista Pensamiento de los Confines, Debats, Journal of Sport History, and La Habana Elegante. He has published chapters in various books, including Miradas al margen: Cine y subalternidad en América Latina y el Caribe, ed. Luis Duno-Gottberg (Caracas: Fundación Cinemateca Nacional, 2009); Poéticas de José María Lima: Tradición y sorpresa, ed. Áurea María Sotomayor (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Latinoamericana, 2012); Redes hipertextuales en el aula: Claves y conceptos, ed. José Manuel de Amo, Osvaldo Cleger and Antonio Mendoza (Barcelona: Editorial Octaedro, 2015); and Sports and Nationalism in Latin America, ed. Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste, Robert Irwin, and Juan Poblete (forthcoming in Palgrave).  He has taught courses on Latin American cities, Spanish Service Learning, Globalization in Latin America, Latin American documentaries, Science Fiction from Latin America and Latin American music. At the School of Modern Languages, Dr. Rodríguez has participated in the organization of various events, including the symposium on Latin American Media Studies in the Age of Digital Humanities. 

Education:
  • Ph.D. in Literature, Duke University
  • MA. Cinema Studies, CUNY
  • BA. Public Communication, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras

Interests

Teaching Interests:
• Arts and Music
• Caribbean Studies
• Digital Media
• Digital Humanities
• Latin American Media Studies
• Media, Technology, and Culture
• Service Learning and Community Engagement
• Sports and Culture
• Sustainability
Research Interests:
• Arts and Music
• Caribbean Studies
• Digital Media
• Digital Humanities
• Latin American Media Studies
• Media, Technology, and Culture
• Service Learning and Community Engagement
• Sports and Culture
• Sustainability
Research Fields:
  • Communication
  • Digital Humanities
  • Digital Media
  • Economic Development and Smart Cities
  • Literary and Cultural Studies
  • Media Studies
  • Science and Technology Studies
  • Spanish
Geographic
Focuses:
  • Latin America and Caribbean
Issues:
  • Race/Ethnicity
  • Communication
  • Cross-Cultural Understanding
  • Digital and Mixed Media
  • Digital Communication
  • Digital Humanities
  • Globalization and Localization
  • History and Memory
  • Language and Popular Culture
  • Languages in Contact
  • Media
  • Mediatized Culture
  • Migration
  • Poetry
  • Problem-Based Learning
  • Sports
  • Sustainability

Courses

  • GMC-6001: Global Media & Cultures
  • ML-2500: Intro Cross-Cult Studies
  • ML-6501: Theory & Foundations Sem
  • SPAN-1001: Elementary Spanish I
  • SPAN-1002: Elementary Spanish II
  • SPAN-2002: Intermediate Spanish II
  • SPAN-3070: Latin American Music
  • SPAN-3102: Conversation II
  • SPAN-3111: Composition I
  • SPAN-3200: Global Latin America
  • SPAN-3500: Sci-Fi In Latin America
  • SPAN-3691: Bus Comm& Correspondence
  • SPAN-3692: Business And Culture
  • SPAN-3823: Special Topics
  • SPAN-3833: Special Topics
  • SPAN-4150: Spanish Service Learning
  • SPAN-4350: Iberoamerican Cities
  • SPAN-4405: Latin American Documentaries
  • SPAN-4454: Latin America through Film
  • SPAN-4500: Intercultural Seminar
  • SPAN-4699: Undergraduate Research
  • SPAN-6405: Latin American Documentaries
  • SPAN-6454: Latin America Thru Film
  • SPAN-6500: Intercultural Seminar
  • SPAN-6501: Theory & Foundations Sem
  • SPAN-8803: Service Learning

Publications

Selected Publications

Book - Editors

Journal Articles

Creative Artifacts

Chapters

Other Publications

All Publications

Book - Editors

Journal Articles

Creative Artifacts

Journal - Editors

Chapters

Internet Publications

Interviews

Other Publications


Updated:  Jan 15th, 2026 at 2:45 PM