Celebrating Humanities Graduates

Mackenzie Ostrowski (B.A., film and media studies, minor in global sustainability), the UCI School of Humanities graduation student speaker, grew up watching nature documentaries and was fascinated by the use of science communication and storytelling within films. When she joined KUCI, the campus radio station, she had the opportunity to develop shows that both uplifted and educated her community. In producing these shows and short films, she began to see opportunities to merge her film and media studies education with her desire to engage with sustainability.

Ostrowski believes being involved on campus is one of the best things a student can do and credits UCI as integral in developing her leadership skills. Among other roles on campus, she took her own advice and co-founded UCI’s Cine-Collective and became the Undergraduate FMS Journal Lead. In recognition of her continued involvement, she received the Distinguished Anteater Award.

Ostrowski plans to enroll in graduate programs that develop her knowledge of environmental humanities and will allow her to further transform her community through multimodal media.

Naja Spotsworth Christmas (B.A.s, Asian American studies and East Asian cultures, minors in Korean literature and culture, international studies) is determined to become the first African Diaspora woman to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea. Despite facing arduous roadblocks, including the loss of her parents at a young age, she persevered and supported herself and her younger sister through university.

Christmas found fulfillment within the Department of Asian American Studies, where she says each professor, course, book and symposium was the definition of perfection. Her research focuses on the intersectionality between the African and Korean Diaspora in America and Korea, aiming to shed light on the lived experiences and highlight positive interactions throughout history.

Christmas plans to attend law school and pursue a JD and a Ph.D. in philosophy program with a Global Asia focus. After taking the foreign diplomat exam, she hopes to contribute to the further development of positive relations between South Korea and the U.S. through a diplomatic career.

As a pre-medical student, Alexis Nguyen (B.A., art history) initially planned to major in biology at UCI. But after taking an art history elective class her freshman year, she changed plans as she discovered art’s power to broaden perspectives and deepen insight into important questions.

Nguyen is grateful for the breadth of leadership, research and volunteer opportunities available at UCI. Along with serving as ASUCI Chief of Staff and the president of four other organizations, she co-founded Students for Health Humanities, the first global health humanities organization led by students. Her contributions to the campus have earned her many awards, among them the Chancellor’s Award of Distinction.

Graduating from UCI at 19 years old, Nguyen will spend the next year completing medical school applications while continuing to research, volunteer, work in the hospital and serve in the church. She hopes to become a physician who advocates for caring with compassion in healthcare and making the field of medicine more humane.

Shortly after emigrating to the U.S. from Argentina, Federico M. De Palma (B.A., Spanish, minor in education) began his higher education journey at thirty-five, balancing raising his newborn son while working full-time.

He majored in Spanish to reconnect with his Latino roots while affirming his passion for literature, especially poetry. Along with winning various poetry awards, he was nominated as International Poet Laureate by the honor society Phi Beta Kappa in 2021 for his poem, “Immigrant’s Song,” written in English – De Palma’s third language after Italian and Spanish. In completing his thesis in the Humanities Honors Program, he was inspired to pursue graduate studies.

De Palma will be remaining at UCI following graduation to pursue a Ph.D. in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese this fall. While he dreams of sharing his love for literature as an educator, he plans to continue writing poetry and hopes to publish collections of his work before receiving his doctorate.

Matthew Costa's (B.A., English, minor in psychological science) passion for creativity, and his recognition of the importance of effective communication skills in today’s world, made English the perfect major for him. Costa firmly believes in the transformative power of literature and its ability to give individuals a voice to express their ideas.

One of Costa’s most rewarding experiences during his academic journey was conducting a year-long research project on the portrayal of artificial intelligence in literature. Serving as a Peer Academic Advisor (PAA) in the School of Humanities also proved invaluable, allowing him to support fellow students and strengthen his teaching abilities.

After UCI, Matthew hopes to use what he learned as a PAA and work in an academic setting before pursuing further education, potentially law school or graduate school for education. He’s particularly passionate about music and hopes to find ways to educate and support others in pursuing their own musical passions.

To Dilruba Asici (B.A., history, minor in humanities and law), studying history feels like time traveling. Upon choosing her major, she turned to her love for exploring different cultures, practices, societies and time periods.

Asici credits her classes at UCI and the projects she’s completed for expanding her worldview and equipping her with the analytical tools necessary to challenge conventional narratives. As a transfer student Asici has only been at UCI for two years, but in that time she has had the opportunity to work with experts in the history field, gain guidance from professors and showcase her research at conferences.

Asici found her stride in joining student government, advocating for students through her work at ASUCI. Following graduation, she plans to study for the LSAT, the first step to reach her goal of becoming a human rights lawyer who fights against hate crimes and anti-immigration.

Ashley M. Rojas Jimenez (B.A., Chinese studies, minor in Spanish/English bilingual education), a bilingual student fluent in Spanish and English, is passionate about bilingual education and the crucial role of bilingual teachers in second language development. Combining her interest in Chinese language and her desire to explore its rich history and culture from a non-Western perspective, she pursued a major in Chinese studies.

Her tutoring experience at a local elementary school reinforced the need for bilingual education and the significance of nurturing a supportive environment for students mastering two languages simultaneously. This realization, coupled with her enthusiasm for learning about different cultures and sharing her own through language, solidified her aspiration to become a bilingual educator.

Post-graduation, Rojas will intern at a graduate school of education, conducting research on residency programs and contributing to program enhancements. She plans to travel abroad as an English teacher assistant for elementary students and pursue a master's degree and teacher credential in the future.

Alexander Ramirez (B.A., classics, B.S., biological sciences) is keenly interested in the contrast between the smaller-scale levels of society and the larger social problems we are grappling with. Using his interdisciplinary knowledge of the humanities and the sciences, he hopes to contribute to combating climate change.

During his studies, Ramirez combined his biotechnology class insights with research in classics, exploring biological questions with a historical and analytical lens. He also had the opportunity to contribute to the Hobbs Lab, where he focused on incorporating scientific research into community engagement.

Ramirez hopes to complete a post-baccalaureate fellowship in climate research and environmental sustainability at UCI and develop attainable sustainability solutions for the community. After completing the program, he plans to study for the LSAT and become a patent lawyer, utilizing his knowledge of biotechnology to advance sustainable climate mitigation and engage in community advocacy for human health measures.

Given the chance to re-choose his major, Benjamin Fuller (B.A., history, minor in international studies) would pick history a thousand times over. To Fuller, studying history is important because he believes there is no better way to understand the world we inhabit than by trying to understand how and why we got here.

While initially apprehensive of the transition from community college, he quickly planted roots at UCI, finding a community of supportive students and faculty within the history department. Fuller credits the freedom to take diverse classes and fashion his own educational path as transformative for broadening his understanding of the world.

After taking a gap year, Fuller plans to earn a masters in public history before becoming a museum curator or archivist. He wants to share the knowledge and joy that history has brought him with the larger community.

Ananya Devarajan (B.S., neurobiology, minor in English) has always valued an interdisciplinary curriculum and created one for herself at UCI, striking a balance between neurobiology and behavior and English. Working as a peer tutor at the Writing Center for the last three years has been one of her most fulfilling and transformative experiences at UCI.

Devarajan has been a writer since the age of six and her first novel went viral on Wattpad when she was in high school. This summer, her debut young adult romance novel Kismat Connection will be published by HarperCollins, making Devarajan one of the youngest Indian American fiction authors in the U.S. The desire to see pieces of her cultural identity represented in the media, she says, is one of her biggest motivating factors.

Post-graduation, she will be attending the Touro University College of Osteopathic Medicine, where she hopes to continue her work in the healthcare and publishing industries.

Sarah Semaan (B.A., philosophy, B.S., Earth system science) has known that she wanted to become an environmental lawyer from a young age. When she came to UCI, she decided that a combination of coursework in philosophy and Earth system sciences would get her there.

One of the most rewarding experiences for Semaan has been her involvement in student government, where she served as ASUCI President during her final year. Working with fellow students and administrators on a daily basis has taught her invaluable skills in leadership, communication and fostering community. But she thanks her philosophy professors for her unabashed empathy, which she will proudly use as a framework to navigate all of life’s intricacies.

Semaan’s summer following graduation is packed as she focuses on her internships and applies to law schools to reach her goal of fighting for the betterment of the planet.

As an avid reader and writer, Rachel Wang (B.A., English, minor in psychological science) followed her heart and majored in English with a specialization in English for future teachers. While initially planning to teach high schoolers, Wang’s time at UCI led to a passion for academia.

She has had the opportunity to help instruct various courses, including teaching her own lower-division undergraduate seminar on Webtoons through UTeach. She also served as President of the Campuswide Honors Student Council and the English Majors' Association, where she found a sense of belonging and formed meaningful friendships.

This fall, Wang will pursue a Ph.D. in literature at UC Davis, focusing on women's fashion and identity in eighteenth-century British literature and contemporary literature/popular culture. Above all, her goal is to cultivate meaningful educational relationships as a professor of English, regardless of who or where she is teaching.

For Jared Childress, graduating from UCI is a victory nearly 16 years in the making. Childress first matriculated at UCI in 2006 with dreams of becoming a professional dancer, but after changing his aspirations and weathering a series of personal struggles, he left in 2012 without his degree.

For nearly a decade, Childress “lived life, working odd jobs” at bookstores and after-school programs — until March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic derailed his career plans and prompted his decision to go back to school. After returning to UCI, Childress “found a home” in the African American studies department, where he could explore history and political science from the perspective of marginalized groups. Though he ultimately decided to major in African American studies, the aspiring writer found a second home in the literary journalism program. A “life-changing” assignment in an introductory reporting class — to interview an elected official in his hometown — led to the publication of Childress’s first piece in The Sacramento Observer. Childress has since been hired as a full-time reporter at the historically Black newspaper.

In addition to continuing his career in journalism, Childress hopes eventually to publish nonfiction books interrogating race and social justice, and to open an independent nonprofit bookstore of his own. His journey to the commencement stage was “long and rarely easy,” Childress says, “but I wouldn’t change a thing about it — that long road served me as a student and made me a better, more compassionate journalist.”

For book-lover Christina Acevedo, majoring in English was an obvious choice, as she had always enjoyed discussing literature and becoming “more critical and inquisitive” in the process. While at UCI, Acevedo was inspired by her Mexican grandparents to add a second major in Spanish, through which she hoped to develop her Spanish language skills and learn more about Latin American culture and literature.

Such cultural research quickly became a passion for Acevedo: For her Humanities Honors Program thesis, Acevedo wrote about government-sanctioned violence in contemporary Latin American novels; she participated in Ballet Folklórico, an organization dedicated to exploring Mexican dance and music; and she served as a global service scholar at the UCI Blum Center for Poverty Alleviation.

Acevedo’s passion for service and research led to her recent Humanities Out There internship at UCI's Langson Library, where she created a virtual book display and learned more about the curation process, and to her position as program co-director at UCI’s Student Outreach and Retention Center. Upon graduation, Acevedo looks forward to pursuing a career as a public librarian and to supporting others in research endeavors of their own.

Trinity Hunt-McGuinness came to UCI to study biomedical engineering, but after taking a gender & sexuality studies course during her second year, her worldview “completely transformed" — and so did her major.

Soon after joining the gender & sexuality studies department, she added an African American studies minor, impressed by the “spirit of empathy and caring for others” cultivated by both departments’ faculty. Last summer, Hunt-McGuinness brought that empathetic spirit to her internship with the Black Panther Oakland Community School Project, where she worked to archive photos and collate histories about the collectively-run elementary school during its height in the 1970s. Inspired by the Black Panthers’ educational mantras — including “Each one teach one” and “The world is your classroom” — Hunt-McGuinness has since collaborated with the UCI history department to develop 10th-grade curriculum about the history of intersectional feminism in America.

Upon graduation, Hunt-McGuinness hopes to continue writing, teaching and transforming the lives of her own future students — just as her community of professors, mentors and peers transformed hers.

Growing up Black and Filipino, English major Jalen Jones rarely saw himself represented in popular culture — but he has spent the past four years working to change that.

In his Humanities Honors Program thesis, Jones explored the startling lack of “Blasian” coming-of-age novels and analyzed how their themes differ from other young adult narratives. As the editor of Politically Invisible Asians, a newsletter dedicated to “amplifying Gen Z Asian American voices,” Jones has highlighted the often-overlooked convergences between Black and Asian American communities. In his own fiction, nonfiction and poetry, the creative writing minor has sought to give voice to such intersections.

Though Jones says there is “no way [he] won’t be a writer in the future,” he has other aspirations, including working in the film industry (throughout college, Jones ushered talent around the Oscars Ceremony for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), teaching and earning an MFA in creative writing. The interdisciplinary nature of the English major taught Jones that he “doesn’t need to pin [himself] down to just one thing” after graduation. On the contrary, he says, “UCI Humanities has helped me realize how expansive my life can be.”

Ever since spending his teenage years designing video games with his friends and competing in coding “hackathons,” Ethan Song knew he wanted to study computer science at UCI. However, he also hoped to spend his college years exploring ethics, morality, logic and the humanistic underpinnings of life in general, so he decided to add a second major in philosophy. The seemingly divergent interests overlap “more than you’d think,” Song says — formal philosophical logic and reasoning is required in computer science classes, and cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and content moderation software are common topics for ethical debates. Upon graduation, Song looks forward to joining a tech company dedicated to “benefiting people and the environment” and to bringing an ethically-informed, humanistic framework to the world of computer science.

Micherlange Francois-Hemsley has always had a unique perspective on the world. She sees it as interdisciplinary and interconnected, and her goals and interests reflect that as well. She’s a dancer, a photographer, a sorority sister, an activist, a student and much more. Francois-Hemsley has spent the last three years thriving at UCI, majoring in African American studies and minoring in criminology, law and society. She has worn many hats in the UCI community: captain of UCI’s mock trial team, photography intern for the School of Humanities, vice president and treasurer of the historically Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, and student researcher for the Asian American and Pacific Islander VOICE project and UCI’s Oakland Community School Project, to name a few. After graduating this spring, Francois-Hemsley plans to fill a gap year with an internship before applying to law school. Learn more about her in this Q&A.

Whether she’s writing, acting, producing or directing for the stage or the screen, Kaehler is at home in the performing arts. As an undergraduate, she worked on 15 student films and over 18 theater productions. She recently finished directing her first full-length play and honors thesis, called “I and You." As part of her film and media studies courses, she created three films: a documentary about her family called “Sparkle in the Eye” and two narrative films, “Lapsed” and “Tombé.” Her writing tackles heavy topics: “Lapsed” is about a ghost who tries to save a young woman from committing suicide and “Tombé” is about sexual assault in the dance industry. She also created the films "How Long You Wander" and "Foresight" as well as the documentary "Earth Mother" for her digital filmmaking minor. Her film work earned her an Outstanding Production Student award this spring.

In addition, Kaehler was the host of “Office Hours” for two years, a radio show on KUCI where she interviewed UCI professors about their research. “I tried to spread it out all over campus, but I found, of course, that I was most drawn to interviewing people from the School of Humanities,” she says.

Despite entering UCI as a drama major, Kaehler was able to explore film and media studies courses through Humanities Core and soon found herself adding the major and taking a deeper interest in film. This summer, she’s going to be assistant directing “Comedy of Errors," a Shakespeare play in the New Swan Shakespeare Festival, and afterward, she hopes to continue to direct and write for film and theater. “All the stories that I’ve written center female characters,” she says. “That’s just something I really care about. I always try to cast diversely, but when I write, I like to write from my own experiences as a woman.”

Peter Hoc McEldowney’s thesis grew out of his personal Vietnamese American family history and explores how queer Vietnamese American artists utilize the powers of pop culture and subculture to fabricate identities, communities and imagined spaces of belonging. “I wanted to conduct research close to myself as a queer Vietnamese American,” he says. The scholar discovered his research topic after learning how artists approach visual production in D.I.Y ways, through zines, 'fake' auto-ethnographic film and pop music.

McEldowney originally entered UCI as a biological sciences student, but he found his true passion in art history and studio art. As part of the 4+1 B.A./M.A. program, an opportunity available to all UCI undergraduates regardless of major, he was able to stay an additional year to earn both a B.A. and M.A. in art history and work closely with a professor of his choosing. In 2021, he participated in the Honors in Art Undergraduate Thesis Exhibition 2021, where McEldowney presented his oil paintings – a thesis on teeth and dentistry as a metaphor for the Vietnamese American immigrant community’s relationship with care and salvation.

After graduation, he is eager to work in a museum, archive or non-profit and create more art. His advice to humanities undergraduates starting their own journeys at UCI? “Definitely take advantage of the paid internships provided by the art history department,” he says. “Even if you don't know if you're ready or qualified (you probably are), just send out applications as early as possible and get a feel for what kind of job you're into. And to incoming graduate students: You do not need to earn your breaks. Reclaim your time!”

When Bianca Vasquez entered UCI as an undergraduate Spanish major, she couldn’t have predicted that, five years later, she would be completing an art history master’s thesis on a little-known Hollywood preacher from the early 20th century. Her research has focused on the life and work of Aimee Semple McPherson – a Pentecostal evangelist born in Canada who moved to Southern California to lead her own church. Her Sunday night sermons turned into theater productions that used cardboard replicas of the radio, telescope, observatory dome, among other spectacles. She entertained audiences of thousands with how she merged technology, astronomy and Christianity – topics which have often been seen as being at odds with one another.

Vasquez hopes to continue her work on McPherson after graduation with the goal of getting it published, whether as a book or in a journal. “I feel like more people need to learn about her what she did,” she says. Afterward, she would like to work in a museum.

Vasquez’ research revolves around how art history engages with pop culture: She’s studied topics as broad as Disneyland, the videogame “Red Dead Redemption 2,” Frida Kahlo and Chinese war propaganda art. The scholar draws in her free time, so analyzing the visual world came naturally to her. She switched from Spanish to the 4+1 B.A./M.A. program in art history after taking Humanities Core coursework her first year at UCI: “We had to look at the humanities through the lens of art history, and that was something that I felt like I not only excel in, but that I really enjoy.”

As an undergraduate at Bard College majoring in Asian studies, Vanessa Baker got the opportunity to study abroad in Tokyo for two summers. But after living in the major international city, Baker wanted to learn more about the average person living in rural Japan. There, she encountered the environmental issues that impact the majority of the countrysides' citizens, and she set out to research their roots and the literature around them. After finishing a master’s in modern Japanese literature from Columbia University, Baker worked in rural areas of Japan for four years, in Mexico one year and Korea three years before coming to UCI to complete a Ph.D. in East Asian studies with a graduate feminist emphasis.

Her dissertation is on rural and proletarian texts in Japanese and Korean from the 1920s, 30s and 40s. She opens questions of power and culture in imperial Japan through the lenses of environmental humanities, gender studies and indigenous knowledges.

Her interdisciplinary education informed a lot of her work: “Something that I've really appreciated at UCI is that I was able to take courses outside of my department, and those ‘diversions’ actually made my project more interesting," she says. "I was taking courses in the history of Latin America, gender and sexuality studies, literary criticism, etc., and even though it seemed off-track, it actually helped me refine my arguments and really think about what I’m doing.” After Baker graduates, she has a post-doctoral appointment lined up in University of Pennsylvania's Korean studies department, and she hopes to turn her dissertation into a manuscript.