Student Profiles

Dissertation Stage

  • Christina Abreu – Cuban-American history, literature, and culture; Cuban exile communities and identities
  • Rabia Belt – Gender and violence
  • Matthew Blanton – Cultural history, race, masculinity
  • Jesse Carr – Sexual and gender violence, racial formation, critical masculinities, right wing political movements
  • Joe Cialdella – Urban/environmental history and culture, landscape studies, architecture, space and place, arts/visual culture, memory, museum studies and public history
  • Alyssa Chen – 19th century American literature; animal rights; the family
  • Puspa Damai – Postcolonial theory, transnational American studies
  • Paul Farber – 20th century American cultural history; queer theory; race and masculinity, hip hop; fashion and performance studies
  • Chris Finley – Comparative African-American & Native American indigeneity, pop culture
  • 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
  • Tayana Hardin – African-American history and literature
  • Sharon Lee – Korean/Korean American history, Asian Pacific Islander American studies, women’s studies, cultural studies, film and video
  • 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
  • Rachel Quinn – Social constructions of race in the African Diaspora, race & nationalism, mixed-race identity in popular culture
  • Kiri Sailiata – Comparative indigineity, military, gender
  • Lani Teves – Colonialism, race, ethnicity, punk music, youth culture
  • Kiara Vigil – Comparative autobiographies, gender, Native American cultural products, and visual culture
  • Lee Ann Wang – Women of Color Feminisms. Critical Race Theory, Asian American Women and Immigration Law, Gender and Sexual Violence Law, Social Movements
  • 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

  • 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
  • Robert Bell – The built environment, identity, movement, and critical theory
  • Rabia Belt – Gender and violence
  • 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
  • Garrett Felber – African-American history and culture, the cultural politics of jazz
  • 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 – Colonial-American and early national U.S. print culture; Native American studies; U.S. women's history; Atlantic studies; Theories of culture and ideology
  • Jasmine Kramer – American prison masculinities and culture
  • Jennifer Kwak – The American West; the “American Pacific”; Pacific Rim Cultural Studies; cultural and media reprentations of Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans
  • Katie Lennard – Material culture, applications of object based methodologies to the reconstruction of historical accounts
  • Emily Macgillivray – Transnational and comparative Native Studies
  • Orquidea Morales – Chicana horror
  • Jennifer Garcia Peacock – Chicana/o literature, environmental history, ecocriticism
  • 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
  • Mejdulene Shomali – Arab American studies, queer theory, non-normative genders and embodiments
  • Kyera Singleton – Black women’s bodies and diasporas
  • Wendy Sung – Intersections of Asian American and African American popular culture, with particular regard to popular music and performance; subculture and fashion