Christine Delia is a PhD student in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She researches global modern art with an emphasis on artists working in Mexico, Morocco, and the United States. Her dissertation, tentatively titled: “Mirror Effects: Fragmentation, Figuration, and Globality in Mexican, Moroccan, and US modern art, 1929-1949” examines three murals by Spanish artists dispersed around the world in the years surrounding the Spanish Civil War. The project explores questions related to exile/displacement/migration, including the economic impact of these...
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 1st year Master’s/PhD student in the Energy and Resources Group department. She is currently interested in situating Caribbean energy systems in sociopolitical histories of empire, labor, and environment to better understand the present vulnerabilities of these systems, particularly as it pertains to anthropogenic climate change and related catastrophes. She comes to Berkeley from Chicago, where she was an International Research Associate at Mathematica, a research and data analytics consultancy, working primarily on energy projects...
C. Darius Gordon (they/them) is a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Education’s Critical Studies of Race, Class, & Gender program. Broadly, they study the 20th century intellectual histories of Black liberation movements throughout the Atlantic world. Drawing on Black feminisms and Black Geographic thought, Darius’s current work focuses on the social, material, and symbolic relations forged between Brazilian Black movements and the anti-colonial revolutions of Lusophone Africa from the 1960s-80s.
Gabriel Lesser is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Languages and Literatures. He studies humor in Latin American literary and visual culture. His dissertation is about racial satire, caricatures, and nation-building in nineteenth-century Mexico and Brazil. He received a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation grant to conduct archival research in 2023. Prior to starting his doctorate, Gabriel earned his B.A. in Hispanic Studies from Brown University and worked at the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. At UCB, he has taught classes in both Spanish and Portuguese.
Cristina S. Méndez (she/her/ella) is a PhD candidate in Education in the Critical Studies of Race, Class and Gender program. She is also part of thedesignated emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization. Her research focuses on the lived experiences and sense-making of Mam women activists who organize across multiple scales for the maintenance of their language and culture and for the wellbeing of their communities across the US, Mexico, and Guatemala. Through collaboration with the activists, Cristina examines how revitalization movements offer the...
Ahkeel Mestayer is a professional musician and ethnomusicologist from San Francisco. His research and performance interests are Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian music. Ahkeel has traveled across Europe and Latin America performing and is a voting member of the Grammy Academy. His current research project is a comparison of musical transculturation processes in Matanzas, Cuba and Salvador, Brazil. Specifically, he is interested in exploring the concept of Black Cosmopolitanism across African ethnic groups in Cuba and Brazil and its relationship to music.
Henry Leonel Sales Hernandez is a first-year PhD student in the Graduate School of Education’s Critical Studies of Race, Class, and Gender program. His interests are indigenous language revitalization, the cultural and social challenges that indigenous Mayas face while living in the Bay Area, and the importance of language and culture in diverse communities in Oakland schools.
Emily Fjaellen Thompson is a PhD 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 with...