Rate My Professor John Petrus

John Petrus serves as Associate Professor and Chair of the Spanish Department at Grinnell College, with additional affiliations in Film and Media Studies and Latin American Studies. He earned his PhD from Ohio State University in 2015. Petrus's research centers on questions of sexual and racial difference in Latinx and Latin American audio-visual media and life narratives, particularly US Latine/x creative works on experiences of the HIV/AIDS crisis. His current project, "Understanding HIV/AIDS Through US Latine/x Literature," compiles a corpus of US Latine/x narrative works and theorizes how these texts help students and readers grapple with systemic injustices in global health, identities and sexualities, history and memory, and structural racism, bridging past and present challenges.

Petrus has published key works including “Monstrous Beauty: The Alternative Aesthetic of Difference in Emil Ferris’ My Favorite Thing Is Monsters” in Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society (vol. 7, no. 3, 2023), "Discussing The Undiscussable: Reflecting on the ‘End’ of AIDS" in GLQ (vol. 25, no. 1, 2019), "Dance as Medicine: Healing bodies in Nicaragua from the colonial period to the present" in The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex and Latin American Culture (2018), and "The Transformative Power of Performance Art in Contemporary Managua" (2017). His research interests encompass visual studies, queer theory, Latin American studies, and Latin American literature. Petrus presents actively at conferences, such as "Finding joy, seeking justice in Latinx HIV/AIDS writing" at the Latine/x Studies Association 2024 Annual Conference and “Questioning the Past, Questing for Survival: Cristy Road’s Punk Queer Latinx Life Narratives” at the 2nd Annual Conference of the Comics Studies Society.