Oliver Ortega is a PhD candidate in the English department. He specializes in depictions of formal schooling in contemporary Mexican-American literatures, especially the bildungsroman novel and confessional memoir. His main thesis is that educational advancement produces a conflict between personal desires and familial and communal responsibilities. Through examining what he calls educational sociality, or the way student characters navigate the interpersonal affective terrain of the schooling environment and related spaces, he argues that these protagonists must continually negotiate the sense of betrayal or cultural separation that appears as the cost of academic success in the United States.
To better understand these conflicts, Oliver takes a transnational approach: He consider how the values, forms and institutionality of education in Mexico differs from that in the United States, thereby contributing to misunderstandings between second-generation Americans and their immigrant parents, an important theme in several of the narratives sampled in his project. He then uses his analysis of both fictive narratives and memoirs to theorize about the real-world “achievement gap” between Latino students and their white European-American and Asian-American counterparts in the United States. He turns towards educational sociology, history, anthropology, critical theory, and educational philosophy to draw out and de-naturalize the role of schooling in producing citizen-subjects.
Oliver has a BS in Journalism and International Studies from Northwestern University. Prior to starting his PhD, he worked as a schoolteacher and tutor. He is originally from Queens, New York.