Student Profiles

Dissertation Stage

  • Christina Abreu — Cuban-American history, literature, and culture; Cuban exile communities and identities
  • Robert Bell — The built environment, identity, movement, and critical theory
  • Rabia Belt — Gender and violence
  • Matthew Blanton — Cultural history, race, masculinity
  • Jason Coráñez Bolton — Poststructuralism, Postmodernism, Feminist philosophical thought and theory, feminist and native epistemology ,Ethnoepistemology, queer of color critique, theories of performativity, Standpoint Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, Comparativism, Hispanic literature of the Philippines (José Rizal), Spanish and U.S. Empire, and Latin American Independence literatures
  • Jesse Carr — Sexual and gender violence, racial formation, critical masculinities, right wing political movement
  • Alyssa Chen-Walker — 19th century American literature; animal rights; the family
  • Joe Cialdella — Urban/environmental history and culture, landscape studies, architecture, space and place, arts/visual culture, memory, museum studies and public history
  • Paul Farber — 20th century American cultural history; queer theory; race and masculinity, hip hop; fashion and performance studies
  • Jessi Gan — Transgender studies of color, oral history
  • Sarah Gothie — Culinary history, gender, material culture and nostalgia; creativity in everyday life as a site of identity construction, autobiographical discourse and resistance
  • David Green — 20th Century United States Cultural/Social History, History of Homo/Sexuality, Queer Studies, Theory, & Queer of Color Critique, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Critical Race Theory
  • Elizabeth Harmon — 20th century U.S. cultural history, Left culture and politics, identity politics and historical representation, public humanities, cultural studies and cultural theory
  • Frank Kelderman — Early National Women's History and Literature, cultural materialism, theories of culture and ideology
  • Natalie Lira — The use of medical and scientific “proof” to reinforce notions of race, gender and sexuality. Queer of color critique, third world feminism, capitalism, neoliberalism and deviance as resistance
  • Annah MacKenzie — The intersectionality of the sacred and the secular in modern popular culture; Gender and Critical home Studies; Theories of space, place and belonging
  • Wendy Michael — Work; technology; science & technology studies; factory tours, Cold War thinking; visual history; post 1945 America
  • Isabel Millan — Children’s literature and multimedia; cyberspace and technology; queer Chicana/Latina/Mexicana sexualities, representations, and transnationalism
  • Erik Morales — Latino Studies; cultural productions and commodification; authenticity; racial conflicts and alliances; 20th century history
  • Hannah Noel — "Indigenous" Diasporas throughout the American Hemisphere specifically the Guatemalan-Mayan Diaspora, Latino/a Studies, Performance Studies, Gender Studies, Urban Studies, Native American Studies, and Theater and Politics (Augusto Boal)
  • Alex Olson — California modernism; public scholarship; 19th and early 20th century American cultural and intellectual history; Native American Studies; visual culture; religion and science studies; environmental history
  • Veronica Pasfield — Native American Studies, boarding school experiences, and oral histories
  • Jennifer Garcia Peacock — Chicana/o literature, environmental history, ecocriticism
  • Kiri Sailiata — Comparative indigineity, military, gender
  • Mejdulene Shomali — Arab American studies, queer theory, non-normative genders and embodiments
  • Wendy Sung — Intersections of Asian American and African American popular culture, with particular regard to popular music and performance; subculture and fashion
  • Aimee VonBokel — Museums, nationalism, social class, performances of belonging, immigration, eugenics, respectability
  • Stephen Wisniewski — Museums, tourism, nostalgia, visual culture, and how memory works

Pre-Dissertation Stage

  • Stefan Aune — Discourses of violence, hierarchies of power, and Native American studies
  • Bonnie Applebeet — Queer performance
  • Yamil Avivi — Diasporas, ethnic/cultural hybridity, Arab and Latino/a Studies, ethnography, religious conversion, narrative/subjectivity of immigrant and queer immigrant subjects
  • Lloyd Barba — Pentecostal Latina/o religious history
  • Ivan Chaar-Lopez — New media and histories of political protest in a transnational U.S./Puerto Rico context
  • Sophia Cooper — Collective memory, commemorations, and race
  • Garrett Felber — African-American history and culture, the cultural politics of jazz
  • Jasmine Kramer — American prison masculinities and culture
  • Jenny Kwak — U.S. empire in the Pacific; 19th-20th century American and Pacific literatures; and colonial cultures of print
  • Joo Lee — Asian American history, film, and constructions of race and gender
  • Katie Lennard — Material culture, applications of object based methodologies to the reconstruction of historical accounts
  • Emily Macgillivray — Transnational and comparative Native Studies
  • Rachel Miller — Visual culture, immigration, and 19th century photography
  • Stephen Molldrem — digital humanities and queer and feminist theory
  • Orquidea Morales — Chicana horror
  • CaVar Reid — Black masculinity, prisons, and fatherhood
  • Marie Sato — Imperialism, militarism, food practice in the Pacific
  • Eric Shih — Social movements, labor and the multiracial working-class
  • Kyera Singleton — Black women’s bodies and diaspora