Neena Albarus (she/her) is a doctoral student in the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a Master of Social Work from The University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, where she later instructed courses in the field of social work. Her research portfolio spans quantitative, qualitative, and participatory methods, with a focus on structural violence, community development, substance use and the intersections of policy and public health in Jamaica and the Caribbean. Her dissertation explores interventions addressing the commercial sexual exploitation...
Jose Miguel Alvarado Mendoza is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. As part of his academic and creative practices, Jose Miguel engages forms of being and belonging that are transgressive, excessive, and fugitive. Crucial to this worldmaking otherwise, he argues, is Tijuana, Baja California, whose literature presupposes a diffractive, deeply implicated onto-epistemological aesthetics. He has presented his work at the UC Mexicanistas and Latin American Studies Association conferences, in addition to serving as a reader for Lucero, the academic journal of the Spanish...
Christián González Reyes (they/he) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature. Their scholarly work focuses on Central American, Mesoamerican, Mexican, and Central American diasporic literature and visual media. They are interested in how Central America has been conjured in the postwar period, both inside and outside of the Central American Isthmus. Indigenous and Latin American Marxisms inform their work. Their work has appeared in Studies in American Fiction, Latin American Literary Review, Chiricú, Chasqui, SiwarMayu, Latin American Literature Today, MayaAmérica,...
Miroslava Guzmán Pérez is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley. She focuses on Nahua Literature from the colonial period to the present. Her research centers on revisiting Nahua manuscripts and translations to understand the Nahua cosmovision and to reposition Nahua thought at the forefront of their histories.
Jair Jáuregui Torres is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Languages and Literatures. His research focuses on Latin American and Latino/a/x print and visual cultures, from the nineteenth through the twentieth century. He is specifically interested in questions of nationalism and transnationalism, migration and movement, archival recovery, and intermediality. His dissertation entitled “At the Crossroads of Text and Image: A History of the Transnational Illustrated Press” recovers a series of US-based illustrated magazines that theoretically and materially conceived a transnational community...
Emily “Milly” McKenzie is an archaeology Ph.D. candidate in Berkeley’s Department of Anthropology. Her research centers around wetland plant management, subsistence practice, and environmental change in the Andean past. She is trained as a paleoethnobotanist and works in the Circum-Titicaca Basin, where she studies the management of lakeshore plants such as totora (Schoenoplectus californicus) and their role in forming resilient subsistence systems during the Formative Period (1500 BCE - 500 CE).
Milly’s other academic interests include biophilic iconography, domestication,...
Lydia Millhon is a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in New Media. She completed her M.A. in Latin American Studies from the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University and received her B.A. with Honors in Spanish at Wake Forest University. At UC Berkeley, she previously worked on the editorial board of Lucero and currently co-organizes the Contemporary Cuban Studies working group. Her dissertation surveys intellectuals and literary practices in Cuba and Brazil, highlighting Black authorship and confrontations of...
Jaleel Mashaul Plummer is a Joint Ph.D. Candidate in the Medical Anthropology program with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory. His dissertation, titled “The Noose of Existence: Blackness, Madness, & the Aftermath of Colonialism,” focuses largely on black Caribbean experiences with madness in London, England and Kingston, Jamaica. Drawing from two years of ethnographic fieldwork in community clinics and day centers, “The Noose of Existence” argues that black Caribbean experiences of madness delimit psychiatric knowledge and pose the question of what it means to be cured and...
The Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science
Daniel Quiroga-Ángel is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at UC Berkeley and a Resident Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development. His research examines the political economy of conflict and development, with a regional focus on Latin America. His dissertation explores the origins of liberal political institutions in developing countries and their consequences for domestic political conflict. He also develops statistical methods and tools to diagnose and address measurement error in causal estimation. He earned a BA/MA in Political Science, with honors, from...
Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
Deibi Sibrian is a Ph.D. Candidate in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis in Development Engineering, and the recipient of a Tinker CLACS Field Research Grant in 2025. His dissertation examines the socio-environmental health impacts of digital transformations, including cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, platform economies, and digital infrastructure, with a focus on environmental justice in El Salvador and comparative field sites. He directs the Digital Ecologies research group and the Engineered Living Materials Lab, leading...
