��������

John Kennedy Godoy is an interdisciplinary scholar of Latinx Studies, Mexican and Central American Cultural Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies, the Environmental Humanities, and Comparative Literature. He received his PhD and MA from Cornell University, with graduate concentrations in Latina/o Studies and Latin American Studies.

His work has been published or is forthcoming in Diacritics, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Ámbitos Feministas, Latin American Cultural Studies, and the Latin American Literary Review, among other venues. His community-oriented projects have been featured in People en Español, Harper’s Bazaar, and the Los Angeles Times. He is also the translator of the book Letters from Inside a U.S. Detention Center: Carla’s Story (2024).

His book in progress, Unaccompanied Figures: Legal Violence and Narrative Form, focuses on unaccompanied childhood narratives, visual representation, and legal policy, and their imbrications in the perception and adjudication of asylum processes. It considers how authors who migrated as children diffract the formal properties of stereotyped imaginaries surrounding unaccompanied migration. By challenging the narrative facticity and legal architecture of juridical testimony often required for asylum procedures, the manuscript questions the liberal humanist politics of compassionate reception that conflate positivist forms of recognition with moral value.

His second manuscript examines the intersection of Indigenous poetry and film, with a focus on Maya, Garifuna, Zoque, Binnizá, Hopi, and Nahua documentary poetics and cosmologies. He works with graduate students in Latinx and Latin American Studies and Comparative Literature.