José Carlos Díaz Zanelli is an incoming assistant professor in the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. He specializes in Latin American Indigenous Studies and the Environmental Humanities. He holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature and Culture from Rutgers University (2022). Previously, he was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania (2023-24) and a visiting assistant professor of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College (2022-23).

His book, Insurgent Veins: Indigenismo, Indigenous Literatures, and Decolonial Cracks (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), examines the development of Indigenous decolonial discourse in the Andes and Mesoamerica throughout the twentieth century, alongside the anticolonial postulates that inform the Latin American indigenista canon. He is also the co-editor of the collective volume Worlding Latin America: Corpus, Praxis, and Global Networks (De Gruyter, 2025).