About Dr. Cortez

Jonathan attended The University of Texas at Austin from 2011-2015 where they majored in Sociology and Mexican American Studies (now the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies). They were mentored by foundational scholars Emilio Zamora, Angela Valenzuela, and Néstor Rodriguez as well as scholars who have advanced scholarly fields such as Nicole Guidotti-Hernández and Monica Muñoz Martinez. Jonathan’s time in Austin was enhanced by their participation in the Longhorn Marching Band, the Ronald E. McNair Scholar’s Program, and as an intern for the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers (IRT). At graduation, Jonathan was inducted into the auspices of the College of Liberal Arts Dean’s Distinguished Graduates and awarded the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Frederick A. Cervantes Student Premio for their historical research on the Chicano movement in South Texas.

After UT, Jonathan decided to attend Brown University for graduate school. In the Department of American Studies at Brown, Jonathan felt a deep sense of community, intellectual rigor, and the possibility to flourish. From 2015-2021 they engaged the fields of modern U.S. history, Latinx Studies, and race and space which led them to write their dissertation “The Age of Encampment: Race, Migration, Surveillance, and the Power of Spatial Scripts, 1933-1950.” Their research has been awarded numerous awards and fellowships such as the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship (2018-2021), the Immigration and Ethnic History’s (IEHS) George E. Pozzetta Dissertation Award (2021), and the Dissertation Prospectus Award from the South Labor Studies Association (2018).

While at Brown, Jonathan continued to work with Monica Muñoz Martinez as well as Matthew Guterl, Robert Self, Robert Lee, Susan Smulyan, Françoise Hamlin, Steven Lubar, and many other scholars across campus. As a Ph.D. candidate, Dr. Cortez taught two courses at Brown, “Race and Space: Segregation, Suburbanization, and Sites of Encampment” and “Black Panthers, Brown Berets: Radical Social Movements of the Late 20th Century.” In April 2021 Jonathan received the Brown University Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching for these classes in Ethnic Studies.

Dr. Cortez accepted the César Chávez Provosts’ Postdoctoral Fellow (2021-2023) in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College after completing their Ph.D. At Dartmouth, they taught “U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History” as a lecture course and was awarded a Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning Course Grant to host three practitioners of borderlands/Latinx digital humanities to underscore the efforts underway to document, catalogue, and research Latinx History.

Returning to their alma mater, Dr. Cortez is currently a Provosts’ Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow in Borderlands History in the Department of History at The University of Texas at Austin. Since returning to UT, they have co-founded the Borderlands Studies Working Group with colleague Dr. Maira Álvarez, which aims to maintain a scholarly community around the shared intellectual interests of borderlands studies. Dr. Cortez will teach “Immigration and Ethnicity” during the fall 2023 semester to 80 undergraduate students. During the 2023-2024 academic year, Jonathan will also hold the titles of Mellon Fellow with the Center for the American West at the University of Colorado, Boulder as well as a Public Voices Fellow with the Op-Ed Project. Read more about Jonathan’s return to South Texas from Not Even Past.

Dr. Cortez is completing a book proposal with the help of a Princeton University Press (PUP) Book Proposal Development Grant for their manuscript The Age of Encampment, which details the history of immigration camps along the southern U.S. border from the late 19th century to the present.

Learn more about Dr. Cortez by accessing their curriculum vitae.