Jennifer S. Ponce de León is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALS) and Comparative Literature; affiliated faculty in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (GSWS) and Cinema Studies; and a member of the Graduate Group in Hispanic Studies. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on 20th and 21st century Left movements and cultural production in the Americas and Marxist and anticolonial thought. She works across studies of visual arts, literature, and performance; transnational Latinx and Latin American studies; and critical theory. She is Associate Director of the Critical Theory Workshop/Atelier de Théorie Critique, which holds an intensive summer research program at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris every summer, as well as public events online and at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Dr. Ponce de León’s first book, Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War (Duke University Press, 2021) offers an interdisciplinary analysis of experimental literature, visual art, and performance produced by Chicanx, Argentine, Mexican, and Chilean artists in the past two decades, showing how their practices were influenced by and articulated with antisystemic movements, including Zapatismo, anti-displacement struggles, and radical grassroots human rights activism. Dr. Ponce de León is co-editor, with Richard T. Rodriguez and Randall Williams, of Puto and Other Plays by Ricardo A. Bracho, which is forthcoming from Duke University Press. She is currently working on her next monograph, Culture & U.S. Empire: Fascism, Racism, and Class Struggle. It is framed in terms of a methodological confrontation between the essentializing tendencies of culturalism that appear in post-1960s US academic theorizing, exemplified recently by decolonial theory, and the historical materialist and dialectical orientation of Marxism, particularly in the heterodox forms it has taken in the Global South and in Latin America, spedifically. it argues for the superiority of the latter's explanatory and transformative power, especially for understanding and combatting imperialism, (neo)colonialism, fascism, and racism. Dr. Ponce de León is also working on “Revolutionizing Aesthetics,” which she is co-authoring with Gabriel Rockhill for Columbia University Press's series New Directions in Critical Theory. It intervenes in debates within Marxist aesthetics and discussions of the culture industry while offering new analyses of works of literature, film, and visual and performance art from the Americas and Europe. 

Dr. Ponce de León co-authored with Gabriel Rockhill the Introduction to the English translation of Domenico Losurdo's Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn (Monthly Review Press, 2024) and she is co-editing a special issue on Losurdo's work for International Critical Thought. Her other publications include:“Cartographies of Contemporary Class Struggles: The Art and Pedagogy of the Iconoclasistas” in Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (Fall 2023); "After the Border is Closed: Fascism, Immigration, and Internationalism in Ricardo A. Bracho’s Puto," in American Quarterly (December 2021); “Toward a Compositional Model of Ideology: Materialism, Aesthetics & Cultural Revolution,” co-authored with Gabriel Rockhill and published in Philosophy Today, 63.1 (Winter 2020); “Through an Anticolonial Looking Glass: On Restitution, Indigenismo, and Zapatista Solidarity in Raiders of the Lost Crown” in American Quarterly (March 2018) and “How to See Violence: Artistic Activism & the Radicalization of Human Rights” in ASAP/Journal (May 2018). Her writing has also appeared in the edited collections Talking to Action: Art, Pedagogy and Activism in the Americas (U. Chicago Press, 2017); Dancing with the Zapatistas (Duke U. Press, 2015); Live Art in LA, 1970-1983 (Routledge, 2012); MEX/LA: Mexican Modernisms in Los Angeles (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011); Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization: Essays on Disruption (NAi, 2011), and in the journals Social Text, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, e-misférica, Contemporary Theatre Review, The Journal of American Drama and Theater, and Interreview. 

Dr. Ponce de León was a 2018-2019 Ford Postdoctoral Fellow. She received her PhD in American Studies from the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University; her M.A. in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles; and her A.B. in Literature from Harvard University.