John A. Mundell is an interdisciplinary scholar of Black studies and Latin American studies, specializing in Black popular culture, gender, and sexuality in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Lusophone Africa. Prior to his appointment, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He holds a Ph.D. in African American and African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley with a certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality, a Master’s in Ethnic and African Studies from the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, Brazil, a Master’s in Spanish Education from Wake Forest University, and his Bachelor’s in Spanish, Latin American Studies, and Afro-American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Dr. Mundell’s research focuses on racial formations and Black diasporic exchange in nation-building projects in the Atlantic world. His manuscript under development, titled Longing for a Racial Democracy: Interracial Intimacies and Popular Culture in Brazil, uses queer reading, hemispheric Black feminisms, and African diaspora theory to re-center sex and desire in rhetorics of racial democracy in Brazilian literature, music, performance, film, television, and digital media over the long twentieth century. He has published research in Latin American Research Review, Luso-Brazilian Review, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, and Palimpsest. Dr. Mundell also works as a translator of Black literature and Black studies, working between Portuguese, Spanish, and English. His English translation of Afro-Puerto Rican author Mayra Santos-Febres’s novel, Faith in Disguise (Fe en disfraz), was published with Vanderbilt University Press in 2026. He is currently working on two additional book-length translations of memoirs by Black scholars and activists from Colombia and Angola.
At WashU, Dr. Mundell teaches courses in African and African American Studies and Latin American Studies on blackness in Latin America, the Black Atlantic world from a Global South perspective, gender and sexuality in the African diaspora, race and racial formations, and food and foodways in the Atlantic world. Having studied abroad in Spain, Argentina, and Ecuador during his undergraduate career—and living in Brazil for five years during his graduate studies—one of Dr. Mundell’s favorite things about WashU is its robust study abroad program that offers students the opportunity to fully immerse themselves in another language and culture for the purposes of transforming them into global citizens. In addition to his love of travel and learning languages, Dr. Mundell is a passionate chef and baker and teaches Latin American, Iberian, and Filipino culinary classes at Fennel Cooking Studio in St. Louis.
Publications
Mundell, John A. “Transposing Mestiçagem: Racial Performance and the Queering of Clara Nunes.” Latin American Research Review 62, no. 1 (2027). Link.
Santos-Febres, Mayra. Faith in Disguise. Translated by John A. Mundell. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2026. Link.
Osei, Cassie and John A. Mundell. “Gayl Jones’s Afro-Brazil: Hemispheric Black Feminisms and (Mis)Readings of Marronage.” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 13, no. 2 (2014): 131-155. Link.
Mundell, John A. “¡Azúcar!: Celia Cruz and black diasporic feminist interjection.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 16, no. 1 (2021): 25-46. Link.
Mundell, John A. “Queer Miscegenation: Freedom, Fluidity, and Failure in Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-Crioulo (1895).” Luso-Brazilian Review 57, no. 2 (2020): 56-79. Link