Graduate Students - PhD
Active Ph.D. students in the Department of Literature.
Comparative Literature
Catherine Nina Evarkiou
Email Address: cevarkio@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2018
Ying Guo
Email Address: yiguo@ucsd.eduYear of Entry: Fall 2018
Ningning Huang
Email Address: nih007@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2017
Biography:
Ningning is a researcher and educator of Asian American literature /film and Transpacific Asian queer diaspora. Currently a PhD candidate from the Literature Department of UC San Diego, she also holds a master’s degree in Critical Asian Humanities from Duke University and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Lingnan University, Hong Kong. In her dissertation, she explores the paradoxical temporality trapping Asian Americans and Asian diasporic queers, both progressing from pest-like immigrants toward the model minorities and regressing back toward immaturity as emasculated /neutered pets, via the critical lens of animal studies. Revealing that the regression of Asian Americans as ornamental animals is the dark side of their progression as model minorities, she envisions regression as a strategic pathway for Asian Americans to transgress the racial, gender and species boundaries. In addition to animal studies and critical race theories, she also focuses on queer and women of color critique, environmental studies, biopolitics, and film theories. Her paper, “And I Shall Hear, Though Soft You Tread Above Me”: The Racialized Queer Migrations of “Danny Boy” is published by University of California Press in Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture. Another paper entitled as “Don’t F**k with Cats” and the Specter of Racialized Queer Violence is under review by The Journal for Critical Animal Studies. Ningning is also a bilingual creative writer seeking publication opportunities for her novella, Joseph the Violinist.
Research Interests:
Asian American Literature and Film, Pacific Islands Studies, Transpacific Queer Diaspora, Comparative Ethnic Studies, Comparative LGBTQ Literature, Queer and Women of Color Critique, Animal Studies, Race and Science, Biopolitics, Ecocriticism, Critical Race Theories, Film Theories.
Melina Jung
Email Address: hyjung@ucsd.eduYear of Entry: Fall 2022
Yui Kasane
Email Address: Contact Department
Year of Entry: Fall 2017
Research Interests:
American Literature, American Studies, Japanese Studies, Cultural Studies, Literary Theory, Transpacific Studies.
Research Skills:
Academic translation experience in Japanese
Samuel Kim
Email Address: sak003@ucsd.eduYear of Entry: Fall 2020
Caleb Mertz-VegaEmail Address: cmertzvega@ucsd.edu Research Interests: Latin American Literature, Contemporary American Literature, Queer Theory, Affect Theory, Gender studies, psychology and literature, Northern Amazonian Region of Latin America. I am especially intrigued with both the portrayal and reception of queer characters in Latin American texts and how religious and historical concepts affect literature and society in general. Biography: I am now interested in the application of affect theory to reception history of LGBT characters in the literature of the northern Amazon region of Latin America. Are innate responses truly universal or are they shaped by enculturation? Of particular interest is the psychological and political influence of contemporary literature to the social acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community. I am also interested in how rural communities steeped in traditional biblical texts interact with gay and lesbian themes in Spanish and American literature. Publications: Mertz-Vega, Caleb A. “Apetito «contra natura»: Celestina and Her Same-Sex Desires.” Celestinesca, vol. 46, Dec. 2022, pp. 97–117. ojs.uv.es, https://doi.org/10.7203/Celestinesca.46.21582. Fiction: Education: AA Spanish & English – San Diego City College |
Makenzie Read
Email Address: mrread@ucsd.eduYear of Entry: Fall 2019
Yi SunEmail Address: yis020@ucsd.edu Research Interests: Animal studies, the alterity of animal, animal representation in different forms of art, Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature. Biography: I was born and grow up in Beijing, China. During 2009-2016, I studied Tourism Management and Chinese Literature in Soochow University, which is in Suzhou, a city famous for its rivers and bridges in southern China. I finished my East Asian Studies MA program in Duke University in 2018. |
Yomira Varela Guadiana
Email Address: yvarelag@ucsd.eduYear of Entry: Fall 2020
Yuchen YanEmail Address: y9yan@ucsd.edu Research Interests: 20th century Chinese literature and film; Literature and Cosmopolitanism; Urban literature and cultural history; Cityscape and memoryscape; Gothic Horror and Modernity/Modernism. Academic Background: M.A. in Critical Asian Humanities, Duke University, USA, 2021. Publications and Conferences: “Bookstore-cafés in Contemporary China: New Concepts, Cultural Capital and the Future of Physical Bookstores.” Presented at the Southeast Conference of Association for Asian Studies 2021 at UNC-Chapel Hill. |
Yumin YangEmail Address: yuy064@ucsd.edu Research Interests: Modern Japanese literature, Japanese colonialism, the intersection of gender and colonialism, the intimate spheres and domesticity of the Japanese empire, and East Asian cinema. Biography: I was born in Shanghai. I finished my undergraduate studies at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, focusing on Chinese literature and languages. However, “unfortunately,” I was more interested in the Japanese language and literature than Chinese literature. Maybe the reason is the large number of Japanese animations I have watched since childhood. Then I began to have contact with some modern Japanese literature. I was obsessed with Tanizaki Junichiro, Nakatsuma Atsushi, and Dazai Osamu in college. I studied East Asian Studies at Duke University in 2016, focusing on the CAH track. Aimee Kwon’s Intimate Empire greatly inspired me regarding its content and writing style. Leo Ching’s class also taught me how to reflect on colonialism, so I decided to write on Japanese colonialism. I went to study Japanese in Yokohama for one year after graduating from Duke. Currently, I am interested in Japanese colonial literature, especially female writers’ works. I am also interested in investigating the legacies of Japanese colonialism. I have been reading some works by Abe Kōbō and Tsushima Yūko. Although I use the word “post-colonial,” we can also argue that the war and colonialism in Japan have never ended. It was shocking to see some righteous left-wing Japanese writers not thoroughly reflect on the problem of Japanese colonialism. In my spare time, I watch some movies and Japanese TV dramas. I am a huge fan of Sang-soo Hong and Murakami Haruki, although I do not want to write a paper on him. However, I might write a paper on Sang-soo Hong in the future. |
Cultural Studies
Bahar Abdi
Email Address: babdi@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2022
Manuel Carrion LiraEmail Address: macarrio@ucsd.edu Research Interests: Materialisms, Post-human Theory, Decoloniality, Contemporary Native American and Indigenous Literature, Indigenous Mapuche Epistemologies, Feminisms, Anticolonial Thought, Two-spirit Theory, New Materialisms, Post-human Theory, Queer Theory, Contemporary Indigenous Art, Contemporary Latin American Art, Film Studies. Academic Background: M.A., Arte, Pensamiento y Cultura Latinoamericanos, Instituto de Estudios Avanzados, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, 2017 Professional Experience: Artist at Residencia de Arte Colaborativo, Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio, Chilean Government, Chile (2017-2019). Biography: I come from a small agro industrial town called Quillota, located in Chile, South America. A place that once was an indigenous metropolis where the Inca, Llolleo, Mapuche, Diaguita, Bato and other ancient cultures shared a common space for intellectual and political development. The traces of that ancient history still remain along with our colonial/modern present. It was in this territory where I experienced homophobia, racism and classism for the first time, it is the place that was most important for shaping my multidimensional sensibility. I am a non-heterosexual indigenous person. We call ourselves epupillan in our mapuche communities, which could be translated as two-spirit for the reality in Turtle Island (North America), since epu means two and pillan is a reference to an ancient spirit. As a contemporary epupillan artist and thinker, I dedicate my work to analyze remaining colonial continuities in our epistemologies and ontologies rendered as a binary matrix of thought. I am particularly interested in materiality as a critical dimension to understand the paradox of the human/culture divide as well as the active/passive divisions of agency present in our way of organizing our worlds. What does it mean to give form to matter? Does matter participate here or is it just a passive receptacle for the human action? Are non-western practices and epistemologies funded in this same divide? My work faces these kinds of questions through academic research but also through my artistic collective practice, allowing me to experiment and practice diverse approaches to question the spectator, reader or viewer. The "Catrileo Carrion Community" is our epupillan research-creation platform where we can modulate our questions through editorial, audiovisual, curatorial and contemporary art practices that include diverse techniques and resources such as book publications, political memory workshops, indigenous revitalization talks, video-art exhibitions, video-essays projections, archive exhibitions, collective essay writing, wool knitting, and poster and diagram design. Our community is currently composed of Constanza Araya Miranda (Journalist and social communicator, epupillan weaver and author of the radio programs Lafken Kürruf and Wente winkul mew), Alejandro Carrion Lira (epupillan healer and creator), Antonio Catrileo Araya (epupillan writer, teacher and weaver) and Manuel Carrion Lira (epupillan artist and thinker). We have published the following books:
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Jing Chen
Email Address: Contact DepartmentYear of Entry: Fall 2016
Vivian Szu-Chin ChihEmail Address: schih@ucsd.eduYear of Entry: Fall 2017 Research Interests: Having received my B.A. in National Taiwan University and M.Phil. in Cambridge University, my ongoing research focuses on Taiwanese and East Asian cinema and literature, cultural memory studies and its representations through arts, the cinematic poetics and translation studies. I also hope to dedicate myself to exploring the international variations of film styles and themes, including the marginalized. Before coming to San Diego, I had been working as a translator in Taipei. I have also been serving as the editor for Taiwan for the online literary translation journal, "Asymptote," since 2013. |
Bias CollinsEmail Address: bcollins@ucsd.edu Biography: Bias Collins is a queer, neurodivergent, transgender graduate student in the PhD in Literature program, Cultural Studies emphasis. His primary research focus is on analyzing adaptations of fictional dis/abled figures from literary to visual mediums, particularly in the genres of science fiction, horror, & the gothic. He is keenly interested in exploring the hybridity of morality & mortality in figures of the cyborg, zombie, & vampire and their reliance on dis/ability in their dis/configurations of the human body. His wider areas of research interests include Disability, Queer, Feminst, & Film Studies. Art Credit: |
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Monique Dixon
Email Address: m1dixon@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2022
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Zach HillEmail Address: Contact Department Academic Background: Georgia State University - B.A. History w/ Film Minor (2014) Research Interests: Film history, early cinema, empire, media and nature, media and labor, globalization, philosophy of history, historical materialism, memory studies, cultural studies, media industries, transpacific studies Zach's dissertation focuses on multi-national film companies' role in the extension of imperialism in the Transpacific in the early twentieth century. Tentatively titled: "Invasion of the Producers: Media Capital and the Extension of Empires in the Transpacific," this project hopes to compare U.S. and Japanese imperialism in places such as Taiwan and Hawai'i by focusing on labor and raw materials necessary to the creation of media markets and their material infrastructure. |
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Nilufar Karimi
Email Address: nikarimi@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2021
Siqi Li
Email Address: sil061@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2022
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Alick McCallum
Email Address: amccallum@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2021
Bianca Negrete Coba
Email Address: bnegrete@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2020
Research Interests:
I am most interested in how displacement, belonging, and identity are impacted by place and space, how stories are told about these things and how we build relationships with places, people, trees, and the more-than-human world. I am concerned with the cyclicity of land administration (an umbrella term I use for urban planning, municipality, property management, and how land is ‘used’) and how gentrification disproportionately impacts low-income communities and people of color, often leading to loss of home/houses and environmental degradation/toxicity. My work is also concerned with the overarching and lingering connections between environmental issues and human rights issues as seen in the prison industrial complex, the building of the border wall, and the continuous disregard and destruction of Native lands, all of which are linked by administrative means and disregard for life; human and more-than-human. I also have a healthy obsession with jacaranda trees, which play a big part in my work. I consider myself interdisciplinary, working between the following fields/disciplines: Chicanx Studies/Literature, Multiethnic Literature, Critical Race Studies, Ethnic Studies, Mixed-Race Studies, Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, Environmental Philosophy, (Eco) Phenomenology, (Eco) Feminism, Critical Gender Studies, Place/Space Studies, Gentrification and Urban Studies, and Prison Studies.
Academic Background:
BA English, Writing Minor, UC Merced
MA Interdisciplinary Humanities, UC Merced
Biography:
My research is heavily inspired by my own experiences with place and displacement as a Chicana who is deeply proud of her roots. I come from a mixed-race family from Chula Vista, California, a border town here in San Diego. My dad served in the Army and because of this I have experienced what it’s like to have a regularly disrupted sense of place and belonging. By the time I was eight years old, I moved eleven times, lived in three different states, four different cities, eight different houses, and attended five different schools. To me and my family, Chula Vista was our only home despite all this. I was away from San Diego for quite some time and am excited and humbled to be back home to pursue my PhD here at UCSD and give back to my community in the ways that I can.
Awards:
UCSD Literature Department Shen Fellowship, 2020-2024
Nima Rassooli
Email Address: Contact DepartmentYear of Entry: Fall 2014
Jessica Silbaugh-Cowdin
Email Address: jsilbaug@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2019
Biography:
Jess Silbaugh-Cowdin is a queer nonbinary (she/they) PhD student in Cultural Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She studies theories of affect and emotion through emergent strategies in visionary and radical forms of contemporary speculative fiction and film. She also attended Clarion West Writers' Workshop in 2016, and she writes and edits speculative fiction in her free time.
Academic Background:
BA, Psychology (minor in English), 2011
MA, Literature and Culture (emphasis on film), 2018
Research Interests:
Affect Theory, Emotion, Speculative Fiction and Film, Visionary Fiction, Octavia Butler, Speculative Imagination, Critical Fabulation, Black Radicalism, Emergent Strategies, Decolonial Methodologies, Environmental and Restorative Justice, Ecotheory, Black Feminist Thought, Queer Feminist Liberatory Practices, Queer & Feminist Theories, Anti-Colonial Pedagogy, Popular Culture
Yanqin Tan
Email Address: tyanqin@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2016
Research Interests:
My research field of interest is film and documentaries, with a focus on modern cultural history of China, through the lens of independent Chinese documentaries since 1980s. My research touches upon topics such as perception and construction of spaces within the films, as well as the functions of film screening in making a public space in the society. I therefore value various research methods including film analysis and fieldworks into its circulation.
Academic Background:
BA in Chinese Literature, Peking University, 2014
MA in East Asian Studies, University of Virginia, 2016.
Yichen Tan
Email Address: y7tan@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2019
Reem TasyakanEmail Address: rehazbou@ucsd.eduYear of Entry: Fall 2019 Research Interests: Anglophone Arab literature; Diaspora studies; Arabic literature in translation; Arab-American cultural studies; Middle East cultural studies; Arab-American ethnic and racial studies; Post-colonial studies; Arabic literary translation and translation theory; Modern Middle East history Professional Experience: From 2013-2019, I was a lecturer at San Diego State University and University of San Diego where I taught courses in Arabic literature in translation, Arab-American literature, and Middle East culture while conducting course-related and independent research. From 2011-2015, I worked in the translation industry performing Arabic to English translations and coordinating translation and interpreting projects for individuals, non-profit organizations, and corporations. Academic Background: M.A., Middle East and North African Studies (MENAS), University of Arizona, 2011 |
Evelyn VasquezEmail Address: evvasque@ucsd.edu Biography: I am from East LA, Lincoln Heights (Clifton St., Ave 28, and Ave 26) and worked on Whittier Blvd. and Arizona Ave. throughout my childhood up to an adult. Triqua for life. I rep sopes from King Taco all day every day. Rap is my harmony. Cumbias are my jams. Academic Background: B.A., English (Literature, Criticism, and Theory Emphasis), University of California, Davis, 2016 Research interest: I am currently interested in researching depictions of impoverished housing in the American city novel (late 19th and early 20th century). In these depictions, I investigate how authors detail the architecture of housing and the narrative structure in which they design living spaces in the city. Some of my previous research experience includes studying the tenement in American comics and urban documentation (planning for low-income housing and communities). Some of my more specific research has included analyzing comic book panels and tenement architectural drawings in Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories (1978). Professional Experience: While an undergraduate student, I studied abroad at Oxford, England and Santiago, Chile. After graduating from UC Davis in 2016, I worked at Pasadena City College, where I assisted students with transfer resources and provided personal statement workshops. I worked at Aspires West Pasadena, an after-school program, dedicated to fill in academic gaps. Some of the community work I have done include organizing a low-income housing community meeting to bring awareness of the housing changes occurring in the Lincoln Heights Neighborhood (2018) and the impact on the neighborhood residents. I conducted geography and reading workshops for Lincoln Heights youth in the summers of 2012 and 2013 at the local library and low-income housing center. Awards: Interdisciplinary Research Award, Graduate & Professional Student Association, UC San Diego (05/2022) |
Chenfeng WangEmail Address: chw058@ucsd.edu Research Interests: East Asian film and literature, memory and trauma studies, non-fiction and documentary studies, transcultural and transmedia adaptation studies Academic Background: M.A., East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania, 2020 |
Shiya Zhang
Email Address: shz030@ucsd.eduYear of Entry: Fall 2019
Chengfan Zhou
Email Address: chz076@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2022
Literatures in English
Laala Al-Jaber
Email Address: Contact Department
Year of Entry: Fall 2016
Research Interests:
The rise of the novel; Victorian literature; Gender Studies; Film Studies; Literatures of migration, passing, and mobility; Psychoanalysis; The Harlem Renaissance; Ethnic Studies; Performativity; Literary representations of The Other; Popular Culture Studies
Professional Experience:
I was the literature and popular fiction librarian at the Qatar National Library for two years. At UCSD, I worked as a graduate student researcher and served as a teaching assistant in the Warren Writing Program. While earning my master’s degree in comparative literature at Dartmouth, I worked on an oral history project and conducted interviews with undergraduates. I served as an intern for the ABA Journal and the CQ Researcher while pursuing my journalism degree at Northwestern. I am fluent in English and Arabic.
Academic Background:
M.A. in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College 2013
B.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University in Qatar 2012
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Nolan Dannels
Email Address: Contact Department
Year of Entry: Fall 2017
Hannah Friederike Doermann
Email Address: hdoerman@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2017
Academic Background:
C.Phil., English Literature, Graduate Specialization in Critical Gender Studies, UCSD, 2020
M.A., Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College, 2017
B.A., English Literature, Spanish & Queer Studies, Denison University, 2016
Research Fields:
Children’s and Young Adult Literature Studies; Youth and Childhood Studies; Girl Studies; Fan Studies; Queer Studies; Critical Whiteness Studies; Ecocriticism
Dissertation:
Hannah Doermann’s dissertation, “Girls Will Be Girls: Reimagining Girlhood in Contemporary Young Adult Literature,” explores the racial politics of models of girlhood in Young Adult literature (YA). Employing theories of temporality from queer studies, postcolonial studies, and youth and childhood studies, this dissertation argues that YA takes girls seriously in the present moment and reimagines girlhood as a state of being rather than a state of becoming in service of the nation. Using different engagements with girlhood in YA as a site to explore the racial politics of this marketing category, she traces its history from its establishment as a marketing category for middle-class white girls to the predominance of neoliberal diversity politics and emphasizing interventions by YA authors of color who explore girlhood as a racialized category. Merging analyses of YA novels and girls’ online discussions of YA, this dissertation bridges of the gap between the study of literature for young people and young people themselves, intervening in the central debate in Childhood Studies about the slippage between the discursive category of childhood and the materiality of actual children by reading YA as a site that discursively constructs girlhood and is simultaneously shaped by the lived experiences of actual girls.
Publications:
“Embracing the ‘Silly Teen Girl’: Intergenerational Feminism, Perpetual Girlhood, and the Twilight Renaissance.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, accepted pending revisions.
“Against Ecocidal Environmentalism: Anti-Capitalist, Queer & Decolonial Critiques of Mainstream Environmentalism in Lilliam Rivera’s Dealing in Dreams.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 45, no. 2, April 2021, pp. 137-153.
Teaching Experience:
Instructor of Record, Literature Department, UCSD
Girls in Literature (Summer 2022)
Vampires in Literature (Spring 2022)
Young Adult Literature (Summer 2021)
Instructor of Record, Critical Gender Studies Program, UCSD
Sexuality & Nation (Summer 2022)
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Aimee JuradoEmail Address: ajurado@ucsd.edu Biography: Aimee Jurado received her B.A. in English at California State University, Fullerton in December of 2019. Currently, she is a first-year Literature Ph.D. student at UCSD on the English Literature track. Her research interests include 19th-20th century American literature, American identity, and African American and Asian-American narratives. Outside of school and work, Aimee enjoys spending time with her family, friends, and dogs. She is an advocate for equitable education and higher education, and she hopes to weave this personal passion into her professional work. Research Interests: 19th-20th century American literature, American identity, African American and Asian-American narratives and their role in defining American identity, Victorian literature and its impact on American character, food as symbols in literature, and food fiction. LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aimee-jurado-22b643117/ |
Celine KhouryEmail Address: cjkhoury@ucsd.edu Research Interests: Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Studies Academic Background: C.Phil., Literature, University of California San Diego, 2020 Biography: Celine is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature at the University of California San Diego researching racial capitalism, racism, antisemitism, and late-medieval and early modern drama. Her dissertation re-examines the long history of race thinking and racialization alongside the development of emergent capitalism in early modern England. Her passion is supporting students from various backgrounds including first-generation students, transfers, ELL/ESL, and students from underprivileged high schools in financially disadvantaged school districts. Teaching Experience: Instructor of Record, LTEN 149: Shaking Up Shakespeare (Summer 2021 and Summer 2022) Instructor of Record, AWP 10: Language and Learning in the American Academy (Summer 2022) Teaching Assistant, HUM 1-2 (Fall 2020—Spring 2021) Teaching Assistant, AWP 2A-2B (Fall 2017—Spring 2019) Professional Experience: Managing Editor (Fall 2021—Spring 2022) Graduate Division Intern (Spring 2019—Fall 2020) LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/celine-j-khoury/ |
Trung T. LeEmail Address: ttl072@ucsd.edu Research Interests: Theory and Criticism, with focus on post(-)colonialism; film aesthetics; world literatures, especially Pacific literatures and Vietnamese literatures; cultural studies; linguistics; comparative literature; modernist and postmodernist literature Current Research Areas: The intersection of the body, the nation, and gender in the formation of identity; practices of encoding the body: the digital, the tattoo, bio-chemical and social influences on the body and behaviour; interdisciplinary studies: postcolonial theory, post-colonial period, and Vietnamese/Pacific literary zones. |
Samuel Lyons
Email Address: slyons@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2019
Kellie Miller
Email Address: knmiller@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2019
Matthew Moore
Email Address: Contact DepartmentYear of Entry: Fall 2016
Laurie Nies
Email Address: Contact DepartmentYear of Entry: Fall 2017
Heather PaulsonEmail Address: hpaulson@ucsd.edu Biography: Heather completed her undergraduate education in English and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She went on to teach for two years through Teach for America in the Hawai’i region where she also completed a Master of Education degree at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa. Her experiences both as a first generation college graduate and as a teacher continue to influence her research interests in Critical Gender Studies, Marxism, Working-Class Studies, Queer Theory, Pedagogy, Film Studies and 20th Century American Literature. |
Maya Richards
Email Address: mirichar@ucsd.eduYear of Entry: Fall 2018
Camille Uglow
Email Address: cuglow@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2022
Vyxz VasquezEmail Address: lmvasquez@ucsd.edu Research Interests: Protest Literature, Translation, Creative Writing, Asian American Studies, Poetry, Philippine Literature, Police Archives, Filipino Diaspora Academic Background: MA in Creative Writing, University of the Philippines, 2019 |
Marina VlahakisEmail Address: mvlahaki@ucsd.edu Biography: Marina Vlahakis is a sixth year PhD candidate in the Literature track. She studies Postcolonial literature and more specifically African literature with a focus on critical gender studies, transnational mobility, and spatial studies. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Research in African Literatures. Tentative Dissertation Title: "The Hair Salon in Twenty-First Century African Literature: The Production of Cosmopolitan Communities" This dissertation surveys twenty-first century African narratives that represent different flows of migration between Africa and the world. African writers of the diaspora employ the hair salon as a contact zone where various face-to-face encounters occur between people who hold different perspectives, experiences, and values. Approaching these encounters from the perspective of the hairdressers, I read hairdressing as a world making activity that enables hairdressers to inscribe their worldview, thereby resisting the worlding of colonialism, a process that privileges a Western sense of social order. As hairdressers negotiate differences, biases, and hierarchies, hairdressing promotes a cosmopolitan consciousness that unfolds in practice to create communities that are constantly made, unmade, and remade. Courses Taught: Literature Department: Summer 2020 Warren Writing: 2016-Present Academic Background: M.A. 2014 English, Queens College, CUNY |
Phuong T. VuongEmail Address: pvuong@ucsd.edu Research Interests: critical race theory, gender studies, queer theory, constructions of knowledge and the subject, neoliberalism, Asian American studies, and 20th and 21st century ethnic American literature. Biography: Phuong T. Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet and writer from Oakland. Her critical research explores Asian/American women’s archives and their creative refusal of recognition and hypervisibility. Phuong is the author of two poetry collections including the forthcoming A Plucked Zither (Red Hen Press, 2023), which won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award 2021. She has publications in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Asian American Writers' Workshop: The Margins, and elsewhere. Her reviews and interviews have been published in journals such as The Rumpus and The Adroit Journal. She often writes to examine language, migration, race, gender and other topics related to her research. You can find out more about her work at phuongthaovuong.com. Academic Background: MFA in Creative Writing, University of Colorado- Boulder, 2020 |
Literatures in Spanish
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Jessica AguilarMarisol Cuong
Email Address: Contact Department
Year of Entry: Fall 2017
Yingjie FeiEmail Address: yifei@ucsd.edu Research Interests: Decolonizing theories Research Skills: Spanish-Chinese translation and interpretation |
Carolina Ramirez Moreno
Email Address: cramirezmoreno@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2021
Andrea Zelaya
Email Address: Contact DepartmentYear of Entry: Fall 2017