John Mundell is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His research and teaching focus on race, gender, sexuality, and popular culture in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Lusophone Africa.
During the fellowship, Dr. Mundell is transforming his dissertation into a book titled Longing for a Racial Democracy: Interracial Intimacies and Popular Culture in Brazil. As a black queer studies and critical whiteness project, the manuscript demonstrates how the ideology and myth of Brazil’s racial democracy is made and reworked from the turn of the twentieth century to the digital age, through readings of literature, theatre, film, samba music, telenovelas, and digital culture. Dr. Mundell's scholarly work has been published in Luso-Brazilian Review, Latin American & Caribbean Ethnic Studies, Palimpsest, and Latino Studies. He has worked as a translator for several peer-reviewed academic journals, including most recently for a special issue on whiteness in Latin American & Caribbean Ethnic Studies. He is currently working on translating four novels into English by black authors writing in Spanish and Portuguese (Puerto Rico, Colombia, Brazil, and Angola). He teaches courses on blackness in Latin American and Caribbean visual culture, race in Brazil, critical whiteness, and intellectual and cultural movements between Afro-Latin America and the African continent. He co-founded and co-directs the multi-institutional Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean working group, or BLAC, that serves as a writing and co-mentorship hub for junior scholars who work at the intersection of Black studies and Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx studies.
Dr. Mundell earned his Ph.D. in African American and African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley with a designated emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality. Previously, he lived in Brazil where he earned his master’s degree in the country’s only existent post-graduate Black studies program (Ethnic and African Studies, Universidade Federal da Bahia) and has returned for field work toward his dissertation and book project. He is an enthusiastic supporter of study abroad for students, having also studied in Spain, Argentina, and Ecuador during his undergraduate career. In addition to his love of travel and learning languages, he is a passionate chef and baker and teaches culinary classes locally in the St. Louis area.