Ramon Saldivar, professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2012. He is Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Studies, and has served as Chair of the Department of English and the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University.
Currently the Burke Family Director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program at Stanford, he has also served as the Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity. His teaching and research focus on the areas of literary criticism and literary theory, the history of the novel, 19th, 20th and 21st century literary studies, cultural studies, globalization, and issues concerning speculative fiction, quantitative formalism, transnationalism, and ChicanX studies. In March 2013 President Obama appointed him to a six -year term on the National Council on the Humanities.
Professor Saldívar has served on the editorial boards of Stanford University Press and the scholarly journals, American Literary History, American Literature, Aztlán, and Modern Fiction Studies. His articles have appeared in PMLA, American Literary History, Narrative, Modern Language Notes (MLN), English Literary History (ELH), Comparative Literature, Diacritics, Studies in the Novel, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, and other major journals. He is author of Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce (1984), a study of the authority of meaning in the novel, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990), a history of the development of Chicano narrative forms, and The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2006), which was awarded the MLA prize for best book in the area of Chicano/Chicana and Latino/Latina Cultural and Literary Studies. His latest book is The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn, co-edited with Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz (University Press of New England, 2013). Currently, he is working on two new book projects, The Racial Imaginary: Speculative Realism and Historical Fantasy in Contemporary U.S. Ethnic Fiction and Américo Paredes and the Post-war Writings from Asia.
Professor Saldívar is a recipient of the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contributions to Undergraduate Education and the Lillian and Thomas B. Rhodes Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. He served as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford University from 1994-99.