John Kennedy Godoy is an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado Boulder. A scholar, translator, writer, and documentary filmmaker, he studies migration, state violence, and the law across Central America, Mexico, and the United States. He earned his PhD and MA at Cornell University and his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh.
 

His first book project, Unaccompanied Figures: The Grammars of Migrant Childhood, examines how law and cultural representation produce migrant youth as "unaccompanied" and how Latinx and Afro-Indigenous writers and artists contest this often contradictory designation. 

His scholarship appears or is forthcoming in Diacritics, Aztlán, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and Modern Fiction Studies, among other venues. His article on Nayib Bukele’s authoritarianism received the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies’ Best Article from an Emerging Scholar Award. He is the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship, a Public Humanities Fellowship from Humanities New York, and other fellowships. He is a member of the Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Honor Society co-founded by Yale and Howard Universities.

During his PhD, John translated Letters from Inside a U.S. Detention Center: Carla’s Story (Routledge, 2023) and directed La Cámara, a documentary on the militarization of the Mexico–Guatemala border that won the Human Rights Award and Best Short Documentary at the Cayuga Film Festival. Presently, he is developing a NACLA series on unaccompanied and familial migration with co-editor Levi Vonk. Following his PhD, he served as the Director of the Latina/o Studies Program and Latina/o Learning Community at Western Carolina University. His earlier social impact work has received coverage in Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, People en Español, Univision, and the Los Angeles Times, among others.

John is a second-generation Guatemalan American from the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. He has lived on Lenape, Aniyvwiya (Cherokee), Gayogohó:nǫˀ, (Cayuga), Garínagu, Quechua, Lenca, Hinóno'éí (Arapaho), Tsistsistas (Cheyenne), Núuchiu (Ute), Nahuat, and Maya lands, and has family in the United States, Guatemala, and El Salvador.