Joseph Isaac Miranda is an Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. He specializes in Latino literature and visual culture, queer theory, and minoritarian aesthetics. His first book project, How to Mourn a Fiction: Latinidad and the Law of Underdevelopment, examines post-45 Latino literature and culture to argue that the racialization of US Latinos emerges from a literary form emplotted into law—the suspended narrative of development. Miranda demonstrates how discourses of latinidad that circulate in Ethnic Studies emerged from early 20th-century legal doctrine—particularly the Insular Cases— that framed colonial subjects as infantilized, perpetual pupils to defer both freedom and incorporation. By contending with the literary, legal, and psychic afterlives of the Insular Cases, Miranda reveals how Latino Studies’ continued engagement with development, as a political horizon and aesthetic form, is structured by the laws it claims to resist. This contradiction, Miranda argues, constitutes a Latino subject defined by loss, whose desires for identity and recognition must confront this law of underdevelopment and mourn this fiction.
His work has been supported by the Ford Foundation and has received the 2025 MELUS Katharine Newman Best Essay Award and an honorable mention for the 2025 Crompton-Knoll Best Essay Prize from the GLQ caucus of the MLA and the American Studies Q/T Caucus. Miranda’s writing appears in MELUS Journal and American Literature.