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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.edu
Year 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.edu
Year 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.edu 
Year of Entry: Fall 2020

Caleb Mertz-Vega

Caleb Mertz-Vega

Email Address: cmertzvega@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2021

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:

With Thoughts of Jason. Publish America, 2006.
The Silhouetted Leaves. Publish America, 2009.
The Unexpected. CreateSpace, 2012.

Education:

AA Spanish & English – San Diego City College
BA English and Spanish – University of California, Berkeley


Makenzie Read

Email Address: mrread@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2019

Yi Sun

Yi Sun

Email Address: yis020@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2019

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.edu 
Year of Entry: Fall 2020

Yuchen Yan

Yuchen Yan

Email Address: y9yan@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2021

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.
B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature (minor in German Language and Literature), Peking University, China, 2019.

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.
“Encounter Holmes and Lupin in Shanghai: Murders, Social Orders and Cosmopolitanism.” Presented at American Comparative Literature Association 2021 Conference.
“Model Citizen (1986): An Outlaw’s Boundary Exploration of Taipei.” Presented at 2020 SPAS Annual Student Conference at University of Hawaii, Mānoa.
“Modern and Diabolism: Spatial Organization and Narrative Techniques in Shi Zhecun’s Haunted House (1933).” Writing (xiezuo写作), 2019 (1). 


Yumin Yang

Yumin Yang

Email Address: yuy064@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2022

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 Lira

Manuel Carrion Lira

Email Address: macarrio@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2019

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 Practice Certificate, Design, Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile, 2013
B.A., Design, Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile, 2012

Professional Experience:

Artist at Residencia de Arte Colaborativo, Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio, Chilean Government, Chile (2017-2019).
Postgraduate Coordinator at the Faculty of Arts, Universidad Mayor, Chile (2015-2017).
Lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, Universidad Mayor (2014-2017).

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:


Jing Chen

Email Address: Contact Department
Year of Entry: Fall 2016

Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

Email Address: schih@ucsd.edu 
Year 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 Collins

Bias Collins

Email Address: bcollins@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2018

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:
Trein Zuniga
https://www.instagram.com/sparebikes/ 


Sean CompasSean Compas

Email Address: Contact Department
Year of Entry: Fall 2017

Research Interests:

Disability Studies; Critical Gender Studies; Queer Theory; Television and Film; Critical Race Studies; American Studies; Popular Culture

Academic Background:

C.Phil., Literature, University of California San Diego, 2021
A.M., Cultural Studies, Dartmouth College, 2010
B.A., Government, University of California San Diego, 2006
Semester at Sea, University of Virginia, Summer 2006

Teaching Experience:

Teaching Assistant, Culture, Art, and Technology (2022)
CAT 125: Building the Written Self

Lead/Teaching Assistant, Dimensions of Culture (2017-2022)
DOC 1: Diversity
DOC 2: Justice
DOC 3: Imagination

Awards:

Dean of Arts and Humanities Travel Fund Award 2023
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation PATH Integrated Fellowship 2022-2023
Dimensions of Culture Program Professional Development Grant 2022
Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) M. Lynne Austin Memorial Scholarship 2021
UC San Diego Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award 2018-2019

Presentations:

Surviving Dystopia: Desiring Disability and the Apocacrip in John Krasinski's 'A Quiet Place'. The Futures of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth College. Hanover, NH. 24 June 2022.

(Re)Designing Women: Prime-Time Feminism and the American Sitcom. The Futures of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth College. Hanover, NH. 18 June 2018.

Dissertation:

Sean's dissertation, "Surviving Dystopia: Desiring Disability and Deliberate Cripping in Apocalyptic Film," explores the ways in which disability is deployed as a narrative device and recentered in dystopian film as a valuable and necessary embodiment for survival. More specifically, his work looks at how various disabilities are reconfigured as a requirement for futurity or the ways in which able-body-mind people must “crip up” their lives as a modality for survival or what he calls the Apocacrip. His dissertation asks how it is advantageous to theorize the body and human experience to desire disability in moments of catastrophe.

Professional Experience:

Population Council, Washington, DC
Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), Washington, DC
Human Rights Campaign (HRC), San Francisco, CA

Biography:

Prior to his doctoral studies, Sean spent several years living in Washington, D.C., where he worked in the field of international development. His professional efforts focused on HIV and AIDS programming to reduce HIV/STI infections, and stigma surrounding HIV, among key populations (e.g., men who have sex with men (MSM), female sex workers (FSW), people who inject drugs (PWID), and adolescent girls and young women (AGYW)) in Western, Eastern, and Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia.

He conducted qualitative data summary and analysis from key informant interviews and provided program management and support on U.S. government-funded, foundation-funded, and multilateral organization-funded projects such as: HIVCore (USAID), LinkUp (International HIV and AIDS Alliance), Project SOAR (USAID), DREAMS Implementation Science (Gates Foundation), Most-at-Risk-Populations Nigeria (DoD), Ghana Strengthening the Care Continuum Project (USAID), and most recently, Breakthrough RESEARCH (USAID), to name a few.

He has traveled extensively in over 25 countries and is fluent in American Sign Language (ASL).


Monique Dixon

Email Address: m1dixon@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2022


Zach Hill

Zach Hill

Email Address: Contact Department
Year of Entry: Fall 2017

Academic Background:

Georgia State University - B.A. History w/ Film Minor (2014)
University of Kansas - M.A. East Asian Languages and Cultures (2017) 

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.


Erik Homenick

Erik Christopher Homenick

Email Address: ehomenic@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2017

Research Interests:

My scholarly interests include representations of monstrosity in literature and films as well as the narrative/semiotic potential of music in films. My doctoral dissertation focuses on the outstanding narrative importance of music, especially by the composer Akira Ifukube, in Godzilla films. Other interests include 17th and 18th century French literature (especially the Marquis de Sade), cinema history, cinema sound, and musicology.

Academic Background:

Bachelor's degree in French (Minor in Linguistics), San Diego State University
Master's degree in French, San Diego State University

Professional Experience:

I have worked as a French and Humanities instructor at San Diego State University. Also, I have been an adjunct French professor at Mesa College, City College, and Southwestern College in the San Diego area. I have also served as a French translator for two video game companies, Sony Online Entertainment and Midway Home Entertainment.


Tatum Howey

Tatum Howey

Email Address: thowey@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2021

Research Interests:

Visual and Media Studies; History of Technology; Poetics; Hermeneutics; Phonetics; Transgender Studies; Performance Studies; History of Representation; Phenomenology; Surveillance Studies; Materiality of Language; Biopolitics

Biography:

My current focus, on the function of the screen and page as ontological exile for the transgender subject, seeks to examine the failures of representation of its constitutive body and the possible methodologies of self-determination through address, both in narrativization and performance, through which the transgender subject may become legibly constituted. I am currently thinking through both art historical and new media theories of visuality––specifically that from Martin Jay, Hal Foster, and Christian Metz––to research this precarious legibility.

My interests are not limited to transgender representation in the arts, and I am currently engaged in a variety of critical theory, including using Walter Benjamin’s studies on toxicity to complete research on the “profane illumination” of Paul Celan’s late poetics and the artist Hamad Butt’s installation pieces that he made while succumbing to AIDS, which contain toxic chemicals. I am also writing through Johann Winckelmann’s theories of imitation and Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the phantasm to emphasize how mimicry and idolatry proliferate in queer communities. I have written on the liberatory force of the gesture for marginalized bodies in both performance and surveillance, and most recently the poetics of transmasculine vocalization through the additive technology of testosterone.


Nilufar Karimi

Email Address: nikarimi@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2021


Siqi Li

Email Address: sil061@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2022


Ziyang Li

Ziyang Li

Email Address: zil042@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: Fall 2020

Research Interests:

Musicology, sound studies, cinema studies (silent and sound films), gender studies, media technological advance and human mindset

Academic Background:

M.A., Critical Asian Humanities, Duke, U.S., 2018
B.A., Chinese Language and Literature, Zhejiang University, China, 2014 


Jessica Lizarraga

Jessica Lizarraga

Email Address: jelizarraga@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: Fall 2020

Research Interests:

Hegemonic narratives, Post-colonial theory, border literature, transnational literature, and narco archetypes. 

Academic Background:

B.A. in English from California State University, Fullerton 


Wentao Ma

Wentao Ma

Email Address: w4ma@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: Fall 2020

Research Interests:

War and media, East Asian cinema, materiality and materialism, Chinese masculinity and melodrama, celebrity studies, interactive & algorithmic media, senses and media

Academic Background:

M.A. in Film and Media Studies, Columbia University
B.A. in Media and Communication, Swansea University
B.A. in Literature of Theatre, Film and Television, Shandong Normal University

Selected Translation:

(From English to Chinese) 

William Urrichio. “Rethinking Documentary in An Interactive Age” In Documentary and MethodsInternational Forum on Documentary Film 紀錄與方法: 國際記錄影像論壇. Forthcoming.

Jane M. Gaines. “Radical Documentary: World Connection Before & After the Internet.” In Documentary and MethodsInternational Forum on Documentary Film 紀錄與方法: 國際記錄影像論壇. Forthcoming.

Joseph Vogel. 2018. “Whitewashing Slave Rebellion: The Confessions of Quentin Tarantino.” 昆汀·塔倫蒂諾的供詞: 《被解放的姜戈》與“洗白”奴隸起義. In Contemporary Cinema 當代電影, May 2019, 86-93. 

Patrick F. Campos. 2011. “The Politics of Naming a Movement: Independent Cinema According to the Cinemalaya Congress.” 電影運動之命名論——依照菲律賓Cinemalaya電影大會所定義的獨立電影(2005—2010). In Contemporary Cinema 當代電影, July 2018, 101-109. 

(From Chinese to English)

Journal of Beijing Film Academy (ed.) 2019. Beijing Film Yearbook 2017, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019, 270 pages, ISBN: 9781783209316.


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 Department
Year 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 Tasyakan

Reem Tasyakan

Email Address: rehazbou@ucsd.edu 
Year 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
B.A., Creative Writing, University of Arizona, 2004


Evelyn Vasquez

Evelyn Vasquez

Email Address: evvasque@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2019

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 
Pasadena City College (2008-2013) 

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) 
Jewish Studies Fellowship, UC San Diego (07/2021 & 2020 )
Sawyer Seminar Fellowship, UC San Diego (03/2021) 
Student Training Academy for Research Success (STARS) Fellowship (09/2019)
Fulbright U.S. Student Program, Teaching Assistant (09/2018)
University of California Education Abroad Program Scholarship (UCEAP) (01/2016)    
Mentorship for Undergraduate Research in Agriculture, Letters and Science (MURALS) (2015 & 2013)


Chenfeng Wang

Chenfeng Wang

Email Address: chw058@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: Fall 2020

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
M.A., History, Tsinghua University, 2018
B.A., Chinese Language and Literature (Minor in Journalism), Tsinghua University, 2015


Shiya Zhang

Email Address: shz030@ucsd.edu
Year 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


Joanmarie BanezJoanmarie Bañez

Email Address: jbanez@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: Fall 2019

Biography:

Joanmarie Bañez is a PhD candidate in the Literatures in English section. She is from Atlanta, Georgia, where she completed her BA and MA in English literary studies at Georgia State University. She studies aesthetics and narratology in multiethnic literature of the U.S. from the 19th-century to the present; kinship and transracial adoption narratives; and Asian American diaspora in the U.S. South. Her work can be found in the South Atlantic Review and The Georgia Review.

Academic Background:

M.A., English (Literary Studies), Georgia State University, 2019
B.A., English (Spanish minor), Georgia State University, 2017
Universidad de Málaga, Spring Semester 2016


Meaghan Mary BarilMeaghan Mary Baril

Email Address: Contact Department 
Year of Entry: Fall 2017

Research Interests: 

20th and 21st century American Literature, Religious Studies, Hellenistic Studies, Political Science, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Environmental Studies

Academic Background: 

B.A., Psychology and English, University of Alabama, 2017
M.A., Literature, University of California, San Diego, 2020

Teaching and Research Experience: 

Teaching Assistant for the Making of the Modern World Writing program, University of California, San Diego, 2017-2020
Volunteer for the Everyone A Reader program, Ashley Falls Elementary School, 2018-2020
Research Assistant for the KID Lab, University of Alabama, 2016-2017

Biography: 

Meaghan Baril is a 6th year Ph.D. Candidate in the Literature Department at UC San Diego. Before beginning her doctoral degree in 2017, Meaghan was an undergraduate at the University of Alabama where she received her B.A. in Psychology and English. Her dissertation, titled “Together Through the End: Theorizing Community in Apocalypse Literature,” explores the intersections between religious, racial, and gender identities and those relationships to community formation. This project shows how different perspectives on apocalypse allow for alternative understandings of the formation and importance of community and the social justice opportunities that community is capable of and has been supported by Institute of Arts and Humanities at UCSD. In addition to her academic work, Meaghan has been a long-time teaching assistant for the Making of the Modern World program at UCSD where she has also served as the Senior and Administrative Support TA. Meaghan was a recipient of the “Don Tuzin Excellence in Teaching” award from UCSD’s Eleanor Roosevelt College in 2022. Meaghan has further experience as an educator and mentor teaching upper-division Literature courses at UCSD, volunteering for the Everyone-A-Reader Program, and mentoring through the Access Youth Academy. Her focus on building community through education is also reflected in her organization of several graduate student conferences at UCSD. Currently, Meaghan is a fellow of the Mellon funded Integrated Fellowship where she works in conjunction with UCSD and San Diego City College educators. 


Steven BeardsleySteven Beardsley

Email Address: sbeardsl@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: Fall 2018

Research Interests:

Filipino/x American & Filipino/x Spanish American Literature of the 20th to 21st century; 19th and 20th Century American, Latin American, and Spanish Literatures; queer theory, particularly queer people of color critique and queer diasporic studies; Asian American, African American, Indigenous American, and Transpacific Literatures; psychoanalysis; feminist theory and queer masculinities; postcolonial studies and the subaltern; identity construction, subjectivity, and nationalizing projects; ecocriticism; and media and popular culture. I am currently interested in reading the intersections between Filipino and Filipinx American Literature and Indigenous Literature from the Philippines through a Queer Decolonizing framework.

Research Skills:

I am fluent in Spanish, and I conducted an interdepartmental honors project between the English and Modern Languages Departments at Hamline University in Minnesota titled:

“Revolution, Redemption, and Romance: Reading Constructions of Filipino Spanish American Identities and Politics of Knowledge in Rizal’s Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo alongside Filipino American Fiction.” This ninety paged project is published in the Hamline Digital Commons. A section of it is also published through the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) 2016 proceedings.

Professional Experience:

I have two years of experience teaching English as a second language to Spanish and Russian speakers. I taught for the Center for Interamerican Studies (CEDEI) in Cuenca, Ecuador for one year (2016-2017). I then taught for Berlitz in San Luis Potosi, Mexico for one year (2017-2018). I also taught for Skyeng an online school based in Russia for three months (June-September 2018). I also have experience working as an independent contractor for the Center for Global Environmental Education (CGEE) where I helped design and write a blog discussing environmental education topics such as water conservation and alternative energy.

More about me on my Linkedin profile


Mayra CortesMayra Cortes 

Email Address: Contact Department
Year of Entry: Fall 2015

Research Interests:

"New World" Travel Writing
English and Spanish Colonialism
Transatlantic Studies
Sound Studies
Literary Histories of Class, Race, and Labor 
Decoloniality
Indigenous Studies
Utopian/dystopian fiction


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)


Oscar GarciaÓscar Fernando García

Email Address: o4garcia@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: Fall 2021

Research interests:

Latinx/Chicanx Studies; Queer Literatures and Theory; Critical Race Theory; Decoloniality; Media Studies; Vagrancy

Academic background:

B.A. English, Spanish (Literary Journalism minor), University of California, Irvine, 2021


Aimee Jurado

Aimee Jurado

Email Address: ajurado@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: Fall 2020

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 Khoury

Celine Khoury

Email Address: cjkhoury@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2017

Research Interests:

Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Studies

Academic Background:

C.Phil., Literature, University of California San Diego, 2020
M.A., Medieval and Early Modern Textual Cultures, University of East Anglia, 2016
B.A., English, University of California Santa Barbara, 2015

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) 
Literature Department, UCSD

Instructor of Record, AWP 10: Language and Learning in the American Academy (Summer 2022)  
Summer Bridge Program, UCSD

Teaching Assistant, HUM 1-2 (Fall 2020—Spring 2021) 
Revelle College Humanities Sequence, UCSD 

Teaching Assistant, AWP 2A-2B (Fall  2017—Spring 2019)                                           
Analytical Writing Program, UCSD

Professional Experience:

Managing Editor (Fall 2021—Spring 2022) 
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, UCSD

Graduate Division Intern (Spring 2019—Fall 2020) 
Graduate Division, UCSD

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/celine-j-khoury/


Trung Le

Trung T. Le

Email Address: ttl072@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: Fall 2017

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 Department
Year of Entry: Fall 2016

Laurie Nies

Email Address: Contact Department
Year of Entry: Fall 2017
Heather Paulson

Heather Paulson

Email Address: hpaulson@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: Fall 2018

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.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2018

Camille Uglow

Email Address: cuglow@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2022


Vyxz Vasquez

Vyxz Vasquez

Email Address: lmvasquez@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2021

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
BA in Creative Writing, University of the Philippines, 2012


Marina Vlahaki

Marina Vlahakis

Email Address: mvlahaki@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2016

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
LTAF 120 Literature and Film of Modern Africa

Warren Writing: 2016-Present
10A (Happiness; Climate Change; Justice in American History)
10B (Food)

Academic Background:

M.A. 2014 English, Queens College, CUNY
B.A.  2012 English and Sociology, Queens College, CUNY


Phuong T. Vuong

Phuong T. Vuong

Email Address: pvuong@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: Fall 2020

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 PoetryPrairie 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
BA in Black Studies, Amherst College, 2009


Literatures in Spanish

Jessica AguilarJessica Aguilar

Email Address: jea035@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: Fall 2017

Academic Background:

Master of Arts in Spanish, New Mexico State University (2016)
Bachelor of Arts with majors in Spanish Literature and Latin American Studies, University of California, San Diego  (2014)
University of California, Education Abroad Program at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2012)

Research Interests:

!9th Century Latin American Literature
Contemporary Mexican Literature
Critical Race Theory
Critical Gender Studies
Critical Ethnic Studies
Decoloniality
Narco-Politics
Politics of Death 
Critical Migration and Refugee Studies
Central American Transmigration Studies
Border Studies

Research Skills:

At New Mexico State University, Jessica conducted research on Spanish Language Acquisition and Teaching Methodology for Heritage and Second Language Learners. Through the implementation of Case Studies, Survey Research, and Critical Discourse Analysis, she was able to present a Didactic Unit specifically designed for teaching Spanish to Heritage Learners. In addition, as a UCSD Competitive Edge fellow (2017), Jessica also worked on a project that took from Fredric Jameson’s concept of “National Allegory” to analyze the relationship between the mutilated body and neoliberal economic practices in Salvadoran short stories published between 1990-2000.

Biography:

Jessica Aguilar is originally from the San Ysidro/Tijuana border region and a first-generation, low-income, transfronteriza student. She graduated from UCSD in 2014 with BAs in Latin American Studies and Spanish Literature and received a Master’s Degree in Spanish from New Mexico State University in 2016. While at NMSU, Jessica volunteered for the College Assistant Migrant Program, worked closely with the Center for Latin American and Border Studies, and was a member of literary workshop Pizca a las 6:30. Upon her return to San Diego, Jessica worked closely with unaccompanied migrant children from Central American backgrounds, something she continues to do during the summer time. 

Jessica is a founder and current Co-Chair of the Latina Doctoral Student Collective at UCSD. She also works for the Raza Resource Centro as a Graduate Learning Specialist (GLS), where she assists in the facilitation of high impact learning components of the Raza Research and Conference Program, and coaches undergraduate Latinx/Chicanx students in the creation of pathways to post-baccalaureate opportunities. 


Marisol Cuong

Email Address: Contact Department
Year of Entry: Fall 2017


Yingjie Fei

Yingjie Fei

Email Address: yifei@ucsd.edu 
Year of Entry: Fall 2020

Research Interests:

Decolonizing theories
Colombian armed conflict 
Dirty war
State terrorism 
Nadaísmo
Narratives on violence
Chinese community and diaspora in Latin America

Research Skills:

Spanish-Chinese translation and interpretation
Translation work:  [Chinese] Mutis, Álvaro. Relatos De Mar y Tierra.   


Carolina Ramirez Moreno

Email Address: cramirezmoreno@ucsd.edu
Year of Entry: Fall 2021


Andrea Zelaya

Email Address: Contact Department
Year of Entry: Fall 2017