Remembrances of Things in Texas Past:
On Mary Karr and John Phillip Santos
José Limón is Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor of American and English Literature in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin, where he received his Ph.D. in 1978. His academic interests are varied and include cultural studies, Chicano literature, anthropology and literature, Mexicans in the United States, U.S. - Mexico cultural relations, critical theory, and folklore and popular culture. In 1987-88 he was a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Research Center. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded him a research fellowship in 1994, and he received another research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for 1997-98.
He has published in a wide range of scholarly journals such as his ''Western Marxism and Folklore: A Critical Introduction'' in The Journal of American Folklore. His book Mexican Ballads and Chicano Poems : History and Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetry received an ''Honorable Mention'' in the University of Chicago Folklore Prize; Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas won the American Ethnological Society Senior Scholar Prize in 1996.
Professor Limón has also edited the writings of Jovita Gonzalez, Texas historian and folklorist, in two volumes, Caballero: A Historical Novel (Texas A and M University Press, 1995) and Dew on the Thorn (Arte Publico Press, 1997).