Esther Díaz Martin

Esther Díaz Martín is a Ph.D. candidate in the Iberian and Latin American Literatures and Cultures Program through the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also completing a Graduate Portfolio in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. Her dissertation entitled “Latina Feminisms and Contemporary Popular Sound Culture: Language, Voice, and the Politics of Production," centers on the cultural and political work of contemporary Latina radio and podcast broadcasters or locutoras and examines the intentional performances of radiophonic femininity countering patriarchy within diverse Latina/o communities across the Southwest.

Nadiah Rivera Fellah

Nadiah Rivera Fellah is a PhD candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Latin American and Latino/a art, and the intersection of art and politics. Her dissertation, "Stills of Passage: Photography and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1978-1992," examines documentary photography of the U.S.-Mexico border. The project investigates how photographs can serve as counter-narratives to xenophobic media portrayals, captured moments of the Chicano/a movement as it unfolded in border cities, and interrogate the complex circumstances of identity formation in the borderlands. In 2015 and 2016 Nadiah was awarded Mellon Curatorial Fellowships at the Graduate Center’s James Gallery and the Newark Museum.  

Pablo García Gámez

Pablo García Gámez is a doctoral student at the Program in Hispanic and Luso Brazilian Literatures and Languages at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He has taught Spanish at City College and Brooklyn College; also, he has taught his Dramaturgia de acuyá playwright workshop at the National Art Gallery, Caracas, Venezuela. His dissertation, "Al margen: Teatro y comunidades hispanas en Nueva York, 1997-2011," analyzes the dynamics in the relationship between these two entities. It explores how communities’ collective memory reflects itself in a theatrical repertoire. It also explores how subordinated identities determined by race, gender, and sexual preference can be portrayed in these theatrical spaces.

Erin Michaels

Erin Michaels is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research areas are Latina/o sociology and sociology of education with a focus on immigration and youth. Her dissertation explores how recent U.S. education reforms are shaping young people’s political subjectivities, particularly Latina/o students. She uses ethnographic methods to examine how the changing context of suburban schools engenders racialized citizenship and how young people learn their roles as political subjects through socialization and discipline, shaping what types of citizens they are entitled to be or excluded from being.

Roberto Rincon

Roberto Rincon is a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His dissertation “Re-imagining the Mexican Nation: A Transborder Study of Black Racial Identification in Mexico’s Costa Chica Region,” offers a transnational history of Afro-Mexicanidad, where social incentives for self-ascription come from institutions, social resources, discourses, and research agendas crafted on both sides of the US/Mexico border. He examines the transnational factors that shape black racial identification within and across borders through multi-sited ethnographic research in the Costa Chica region of Southern Mexico and Afro-Mexican communities in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 2015, he was awarded the competitive Abraham Lincoln Fellowship Award by UIC’s Graduate College. 

Kendy Rivera

Kendy Rivera is a PhD candidate in Chicana and Chicano Studies at the UCLA Cesar E. Chavez Dept. of Chicana/o Studies. As a U.S.-México transnational student, 1st-generation Mexican immigrant, college-transfer, first-generation graduate educated, queer mujer, and, part of the first doctoral cohort in Chicana/o Studies, Kendy's scholarship focuses on unexplored experiences at the borderlands of the nation-state, race, class, ethnicity, language, gender, and sexuality. Kendy’s dissertation project explores Tijuana-San Diego transborder flexible citizenship through ethnographic research, phenomenological narratives, and cognitive maps of borderlands experiences.

Omar Ramadan-Santiago

Omar Ramadan-Santiago is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Anthropology Department at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. He received his BA in Anthropology/Sociology and Religion from Swarthmore College and MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from New York University. He was awarded a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant in 2014 to conduct ethnographic research in Puerto Rico. His research interests include race, religion, performance, and identity formation/construction. His dissertation is titled "Becoming the “Third Race”: Racial Imagination and African Identity Among Puerto Rican Rastafari." It examines the ways in which the Rastafari community in Puerto Rico explores and embodies blackness as a personal and political identity.

Tatiana Reinoza

Tatiana Reinoza is an art historian and independent curator with a specialization in U.S. Latino art. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016. Her research examines the relationship between printmaking and identity formation, specifically how workshop production contributed to the shared notion of being Latina/o in the United States. Her second area of research explores art and trauma in relation to the Central American diaspora, informed by her own diasporic experience as a Salvadoran immigrant of the 1.5-generation. In the fall of 2016, she joins the Society of Fellows for a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth College.  

Marilu Medrano

Marilu Medrano is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at UCLA.  She is currently working as a Research and Insights Analyst for Troika before she begins her position as a Research and Instructional Tech Consultant at UCLA in the Fall. She is making the finishing touches on her dissertation titled "Performance and Mestizaje in 20th/21st Century Literature of the Americas," and she will be filling Spring 2017. Other interests include developing video games with narratives geared towards reimagining the Americas and its untold (lesser known) stories. 

Yvette Martínez-Vu

Yvette Martínez-Vu received her PhD in Theater and Performance Studies from UCLA. Her dissertation, titled, " "Transindigenous Materialities: Gender, Indigeneity, and Objects in Mexicana and Chicana Performance," examined how Mexican, Chicana, and indigenous women used theatrical objects as a medium for resistance and empowerment within post-1990s performances in Mexico and the U.S. Yvette is also the co-founder of two activist collectives, the multi-institutional Chicana Motherwork collective and UCLA Mothers of Color in Academia de UCLA group. Yvette accepted a position as Assistant Director for UC Santa Barbara’s McNair Scholars Program.

Ryan Hamilton

Ryan Hamilton received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2016. His dissertation focused on the processes, effects, and community reactions to state driven economic development and land dispossession in Samaná, Dominican Republic. He has worked as the Director of Public Programs for the Institute for Socio-Ecological Research and a board member and organizer with the Mayaguez Childrens Library. He was awarded a Cogut Center for the Humanities Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Africana Studies at Brown University.  He is also working as the Principal Investigator in two funded conservation projects: one funded through NOA on sea grass conservation in Puerto Rico and the other through ISER Caribe on sustainable fisheries in the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic.  

 

Ana Báez

Ana Báez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her dissertation engages narratives of ruins in contemporary Caribbean literary texts so as to read varying forms of engagement with the question of identity/difference for thinking the present. Her hypothesis is that recent literary texts invite new forms of reconfiguring subjects and spaces. Against the backdrop of failed utopian ideals, Ana argues that the twenty-first century literary texts she reads move beyond the impasse of identititarian foundationalism and thus rethink the terms of the political, and subsequently communitarian politics.

Ariel Arnau

Ariel Arnau is PhD candidate in the History department at the CUNY – Graduate Center. His research interests include the law, citizenship, the American civil rights movement, and the political culture of Latino communities in urban America. Arnau was born and raised in the Bronx and spent ten years in higher education administration and the non-profit sector in Philadelphia before deciding to return to academia. He has been teaching at Temple University as an adjunct since 2008.