Derek Allen is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley in the Luso-Brazilian Literature and Culture track with a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies. He received his M.A. in Portuguese from Indiana University in 2020, and his B.A. in Portuguese from Brigham Young University in 2014.
Leo Dunsker is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and the Program for Critical Theory. His dissertation project is about the reinvention of the epic poem by modern Anglophone Caribbean writers as a vehicle for narrating supposedly unarratable histories. He co-organizes the Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Working Group at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, as well as the Poetry Colloquium and Postcolonial/Global Anglophone Colloquium in the Department of English.
Adriana Gonzales is a 2nd year Master’s/Ph.D. student in the Energy and Resources Group department. She is interested in investigating energy, disaster, and climate change adaptation in the Caribbean from an ecological and humanistic lens. She is particularly interested in understanding sociopolitical histories of empire, labor, and environment to better understand the present vulnerabilities of Caribbean ecologies and energy systems in Dominica and Puerto Rico under conditions of climate change and related catastrophes. Adriana is also the co-founder of the Caribbean Coalition at Berkeley...
Cristina S. Méndez (she/ella) is a Chicana educator, scholar, and poet. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley and is also a member of the designated emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization. Her research focuses on the lived experiences and sense-making of Maya Mam women lideresas who organize for the vitality of their language and culture, as well as for the wellbeing of their communities across Guatemala, México, and the United States. Cristina engages in collaborative research with Mam community members on...
Rafa Meza Duriez, a Nicaraguan educator and writer, is a former Fulbright Scholar. Rafa's exploration of literacy and language practices from rural zones in Central America allows him to analyze the pedagogical value that service offers to teachers' reflective work, as understood by the epistemologies and ontologies by which communities live every day. More broadly, Rafa's research focuses on systematizing success stories from the Global South that propose educational alternatives to our current civilization crisis. Ultimately, his goal, both academically and morally, is to uncover...
Sandra Oseguera (she/her/ella) is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she examines long-term human-environmental interactions. Her dissertation focuses on long-term traditional agricultural practices among the Indigenous Zapotec people in the Northern Highlands of Oaxaca, Mexico, investigating the impact of these practices on environmental resilience and cultural persistence. Sandra's academic interests include decoloniality, food sustainability and food sovereignty discussions, traditional ecological knowledge, and archaeological...
Rodney Padovani is a choral composer, a professional choral singer as a tenor, and musicologist from San Juan, Puerto Rico. His research interests are late 20th and 21st century Puerto Rican music and visual arts. His main research project is about the pluralism of avant-garde composers and the evolutive eclecticism developed into contemporary music in Puerto Rico during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on the music and life of these composers, he explores their style from a global perspective, politics, and resistance within Puerto...
Emily Fjaellen Thompson is a Ph.D. Candidate in socio-cultural anthropology. Her dissertation considers the use and lives of images, particularly unpublished photographs, in the wake of the Peruvian internal armed conflict. As a Fulbright DDRA-Hays Fellow in Peru, she focused on the relationship between photography and memory, and how images enable us to construct narratives around traumatic pasts. She earned her bachelor's degree in Latin American and Latino/a Studies from Vassar College, where she was awarded the Burnam Fellowship for work on the U.S.-Mexico border...
Michelle Zaragoza, LCSW (she/ella), is a Ph.D. student in Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. Centering on well-being among Latinx and immigrant communities, her research interests lie at the intersection of immigration and mental health. Her current work employs arts-based methods and storytelling to investigate the experiences and conceptualizations of mental health among Central American unaccompanied immigrant youth living in the Bay Area. Her research aims to better understand the lived experiences of Latinx communities to develop culturally relevant and...
