Bio

Raúl  Rubio is Chair of Languages and Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies  at The New School in Manhattan. Rubio was trained as a Hispanist and  language teacher later completing graduate work in media, comparative  literature, and cultural studies. He has held faculty appointments at  The College of William and Mary, Wellesley College, and most recently at  the City University of New York (CUNY). Rubio completed his doctoral  degree at Tulane University in New Orleans with concentrations in Latin  American & Latinx studies. He holds an MA degree in Spanish from  Middlebury College of Vermont and an MS degree in Higher Education  Administration from the Marxe School of Public & International  Affairs at Baruch College (CUNY).

Rubio's  writing has been anthologized alongside a long list of scholars,  including, bell hooks, Stanley Aronowitz, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Rafael  Rojas, and Henry Giroux. His research is grounded in the  interdisciplinary field of material culture, which examines a wide-range  of artifacts, from cultural commodities to the museum archive. Rubio is  currently on the Editorial Board of the journal Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture (Intellect Books, Bristol, UK) and a reviewer for the National Humanities Center's annual Residential Fellowship program. From 2010 to 2014 he served on the Board of Directors of the National Association for Ethnic Studies (NAES) and was Cuba Project Fellow at the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) from 2009-2015.
Rubio's book La Habana: cartografías culturales was  published in 2013 by the Aduana Vieja press of Spain. It examines the  worldwide fascination with Cuba and things Cuban during the last  century, particularly envisioning how the city of Havana, has been more  than a scenic backdrop, as the nation’s most visible  protagonist. Rubio's research engages with the anthropological analysis  of the aesthetics and commodification of visual and material cultures,  particularly the examination of identity (race, ethnicity, gender and  sexuality).
Rubio's research has been published in numerous academic anthologies, including, Cuba: Idea of a Nation Displaced (SUNY Press, 2007); Narratología y discursos multiples (Editorial Dunken, 2013); Living With Class: Philosophical Reflections on Identity and Material Culture (Palgrave, 2013); Un pueblo Disperso: Dimensiones sociales y culturales de la diáspora cubana (Aduana Vieja, 2014); The Handbook on Cuban History, Literature, and the Arts: New Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary Social Change (Paradigm, 2014); Racial and Ethnic Identities in the Media (Palgrave, 2016); Reading Cuba: discurso literario y geogragrafía transultural​ (Aduana Vieja, 2018); Identidad y postnacionalismo en la cultura cubana (Aduana Vieja, 2019); and Ethnic Resonances in Performance, Literature, and Identity (Routledge, 2020).

His scholarship has appeared in a wide-range of cross-disciplinary peer-reviewed academic journals, including, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture (U. of Texas Press); Letras Hispanas (Texas State University);  CiberLetras (Lehman College, City University of New York); Espéculo: revista de estudios literarios (Universidad Complutense-Madrid,Spain); Caribe: revista de literatura y cultura (Marquette University); Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana (Arizona State University); Hipertexto (University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley).
Prior  to his arrival at The New School in 2015, Rubio was Associate Professor  of Modern Languages and Literature at John Jay College of the City  University of New York (CUNY).  At CUNY, Rubio was an at-large member of  the John Jay College Faculty Senate and College Council (2013-2014;  2014-2015).  He served as Faculty Advisor to John Jay’s Student Council  (2012-2013) and was a member of the Food Advisory Board 2013-2015. Rubio  was a member of the Middle-States Reaccreditation Work Group on Faculty  Affairs in preparation for the spring 2013 Middle States  Reaccreditation process. While at CUNY, Rubio performed a variety of  administrative roles at the department level. From the fall of 2009  through the summer of 2011 he was Placement Coordinator, Advisor, and  Liaison to the Foreign Language Laboratory. During the spring of 2013  and through the 2013-2014 academic year, he coordinated assessment  activities for the department, which included the gathering and  reporting of outcomes assessment data for the department’s courses for  all languages. Rubio taught Spanish-language courses at all levels,  including Latin American literature and theatre, Professional Spanish,  and courses in English pertaining to Latin American and U.S. Latino/a  cultural studies. He was an affiliated faculty member of John Jay’s  Program in Gender Studies. In 2012 he was involved in a fascinating  co-curricular initiative, the development of a Spanish-language learning  community for John Jay students, where Rubio’s new course “Nature and  Society in the Hispanic World” was paired with a Natural Sciences course  taught by Professor Nathan Lents of the Department of Biology.