4 minute read
Pablo MartÍn Ruiz
PABLO MARTÍN RUIZ
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, ROMANCE STUDIES
Professor Pablo Ruiz starts his introductory classes with one seemingly simple question: “How many continents are there in the world?” The answer? Teachers across the United States teach that there are seven continents, but in Latin America and parts of Europe, the Americas are one singular entity. “When you start realizing the way the world is divided is arbitrary—that it could be divided differently—then you start thinking, ‘why do some regions have a name or have characteristics that are attributed to them?’” Whether he’s teaching a survey on Latin American literature, a course on the fundamentals of Spanish translation, song, and songwriting in South America, or on the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Ruiz aims to imbue his students with a distinct outlook on Latin America—one that stresses that the region is highly heterogeneous internally and also shows continuities with other parts of the world.
Ruiz was born in San Francisco, CA to Argentine parents. Less than a year after his birth, his parents migrated back to Argentina, where Ruiz grew up and attended the University of Buenos Aires. As a teenager, Ruiz thought he would follow in his father’s footsteps and become an engineer because of his interest in mathematics and physics. However, he quickly realized he did not want to pursue engineering as a profession, and took advantage of the ease of exploration in a large university. A couple of years after studying piano performance at a conservatory, Ruiz found his future creative and academic calling: the field of literature and linguistics. After finishing his studies at the University of Buenos Aires, Ruiz moved to the United States to receive his PhD in comparative literature from Princeton University before settling in Boston. One thing he appreciates about teaching Tufts students is how they embody the institution’s tradition for global perspectives and civic engagement. “In the U.S., there is a tendency to focus on leadership, which stresses the individual. But what happens if everyone is a leader?” Ruiz encourages his students to view themselves not just as individuals but also as members of various communities—to address multiple parts of their identity and to include the collective in their ways of thinking.
Ruiz’s understanding of the collective and the individual manifests in inspiring, experimental, and unconventional ways of thinking. He is an experimental writer, evident in the personal and collective projects he is pursuing while on sabbatical. He highlights that, because collaborative work is not commonplace in the humanities, he compensates for this gap by establishing and being a part of collectives.
Ruiz is a founding member of two collectives. One is called Outranspo, a group of academics, writers, and translators from different countries and languages devoted to experimental and creative forms of translation. The other is La Intermundial Holobiente, an interdisciplinary three-person cohort consisting of a philosopher, a writer, and a visual artist which aims to dismantle anthropocentrism by giving life to non-human and non-living entities. Concerned by the ecological implications and consequences of placing humans above all else, Ruiz and his colleagues coined a novel word in Spanish, holobiente, that generalizes this symbiotic system to refer to all things that exist. They embarked on an expansive project that conceptualized creating a book written by non-human entities, titled El Libro de las Diez mil Cosas. In this peculiar book, the center of the pages are left intentionally blank to represent the illegible writings of non-human entities. Ruiz and his colleagues brought on writers and artists to answer the question at the project’s core: how do we imagine the otherness of being non-human through an exercise of translation and reading through imagination? The contributors, including visitors who reviewed the book’s first version at an exhibition, had the task of creating the legible components of the book through paratext. Paratext refers to the information that borders the central text, including footnotes, epigraphs, illustrations, and annotations. Through this open structure, Ruiz invites readers to contribute their findings to the book and subvert human-centric thinking by relegating themselves to the periphery.
Pablo Ruiz’s creativity, imagination, and enriching perspective shine through in how he discusses his outlook on life, the courses he teaches, and his passion projects. By the end of his sabbatical, Ruiz hopes to have completed a second volume of creative writing as well as expanding La Intermundial Holobiente’s original version of the book and work towards a final submission for publishing with Steidl, a renowned German publisher of art books. Ruiz emphasizes that he views this book as unfinishable—an object that is permanently in the process of creation.
