Dr. Cortez has interned and worked for the Smithsonian Institution, conducted research for award-winning digital history projects, and traveled across the world to collect objects and interviews for a multi-site exhibition in Providence, Rhode Island.

In 2017, Jonathan was selected as a Latino Museum Studies Fellow at the Smithsonian. Paired with Dr. María Martinez at the National Museum of the American Indian, Jonathan helped in building curriculum, giving tours to visiting tribal nations, and conducted research for a project on pre-Columbian mirrors in Latin America. They returned to the Smithsonian as a contracted curatorial assistant at the National Museum of American History from 2019-2020. Part of an exploratory research team for an exhibit titled “A Nation of Sanctuary” led by Dr. Sam Vong, Jonathan created bibliographies and initiated community-level connections about two topics: 1) the migration of Mexican refugees to Texas as a result of the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Rebellion, and 2) the migration of indigenous Central Americans, specifically Mayan Guatemalans, to North Carolina in the 20^th century. These experiences in Washington, DC underscored to Dr. Cortez the importance and urgency of learning and teaching the historiography of Latinx and Latin American indigeneities.

Jonathan’s public humanities and digital humanities work expands across content and continents. As part of a group of five Public Humanities students from Brown, Jonathan traveled to Hong Kong in 2016 to work with scholars and activists from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. They interviewed over twenty students, artists, and faculty who participated in the occupation of major Hong Kong intersections as part of the Umbrella Movement’s calls for universal suffrage. The group took tours of the occupation sites, listened to lectures, and viewed archival material. This resulted in three exhibits in Providence, RI that covered protest art, photography, and youth activism. From 2015-2017, Jonathan was a researcher for the digital humanities project Mapping Violence, led by Dr. Monica Martinez, documenting the history of racial violence along the southern border. Dr. Cortez’s global collaborations continue to build transnational support for the public humanities.

While on Brown and Dartmouth’s campuses, Jonathan has facilitated various on-campus programs with colleagues to diversify intellectual discourses. In 2017 Jonathan was named a Brown Graduate School Community Fellow. In this capacity, Jonathan and their colleague Majida Kargbo initiated a reading group titled “Deviant Bodies, Deviant Minds: A Queer People of Color Reading Group,” which focused on fostering community-building through shared dialogue and open discussion on issues such as racialized subjectivity, disability, class, and their various intersections.

Most recently, students in Jonathan’s “U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History,” approached them about the plight of Haitian migrations along the border. Dr. Cortez paired with the Dartmouth Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality to host and moderate a scholarly panel about the history of Haiti, the global migration of the Haitian diaspora, and the current role of anti-Blackness along the U.S.-Mexico border.