Graduate Students

Current GFE Students

 

Home Department: Spanish and Portuguese

Fernanda is a PhD student in the department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her work focuses on material poetics, the intersections between activism and literature, and women writers of the 20th and 21st century in Mexico. She received her BA in Hispanic Literature from Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM). Along with her academic work, she also writes fiction and non-fiction exploring themes such as language, pain and violence. 

Chasia Elzina Jeffries

Home Department: Culture and Theory Program

Amy Lantrip

Home Department: East Asian Studies

Lantrip studies early modern and modern Chinese literature in the Department of East Asian Studies. Her research interests include early Chinese science/speculative fiction, particularly the presentation of gender equality and women's rights, and satire. She is especially interested in fiction that appears in early women's journals and its impact on Chinese feminism.

Asha Rieussec

Home Department: East Asian Studies

Sarah Rodriguez

Home Department: Nursing Science

Will Saladin

Home Department: Comparative Literature

Camila Sanhueza

Home Department:  History

Kathryn Schubert

Home Department: Department of English
Kathryn's research focuses on the ethical and political possibilities presented by the manipulable body in Shakespeare’s plays. She is interested in the ways in which Shakespeare’s characters—particularly those whose bodies are marked by a vulnerability linked to gender—demonstrate new ways of relating to others that have profound political implications.

Research Interests: Early modern literature, Shakespeare, political theory, feminist theory, vulnerability and embodiment, ethics

Martha Tesfalidet

Home Department: English

Anna Wainwright

Home Department: Sociology

Elane Westfaul

Home Department: Political Science

Sophie Wheeler

Home Department: East Asian Studies

 

 

Previous GFE Students

Elaine Kathryn Andres

Home Department: Culture & Theory

Research Interests: feminist cultural studies, music and place, popular cultures of U.S. empire, performance studies, Asian American and Filipinx studies

Vanessa Baker

 

Robert Theodore Barrett

Robert’s research and teaching interests are North American Literature, Film, and Visual & Performing Arts, with a focus on gender, sexuality, race, and class. His dissertation examines literature, performance, art and activism in San Francisco, responding to the early part of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and how we remember, and memorialize, artists and activists of the period. The larger question he is exploring in this project deals with cultural transmission; how do those elided or erased from history transmit culture into the future, and how is that history received and re-transmitted? As such, Robert’s dissertation examines affective affinities with historical figures, how their iconic legacies are transmitted, and mythmaking and fabulation as modes of resistance to erasure.

Dan/Dani Bustillo

Home Department: Visual Studies
 

Research Interests: queer and trans of color theory, queer latinx studies, feminist security studies, surveillance studies, media of resistance

Ssu-yu (Jill) Chen

Research Interests: Gender Governance, Kinship, Critical Race Theory, Theory of Nationalism and Nation-Building, Postcolonialism in East Asia

Erica Maria Cheung

Home Department: Culture & Theory

My dissertation examines the role that food plays in the racialization and gendering of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of popular culture texts, I illustrate how an American appetite for Asian taste, or what I theorize as "umami," is indicative of larger processes of U.S. imperialism, racial capitalism, and the gendered production of labor.

Research Interests: Cultural studies, critical race theory, food studies, media studies

Kylie Ching

Home Department: Visual Studies

Research Interests: Asian American visual culture and art history, contemporary American art history, feminist and queer theory, cultural memory, alternative press, and artist collectives

Monica W Cho

Home Department: East Asian Studies

Monica is a doctoral candidate at the department of East Asian Studies. Monica's research interrogates the trend in post-Korean War literature that employs madness of individuals in order to reflect on larger social concerns such as historical vestiges, state brutality, collective emotional distress, and power disproportion in the context of South Korea.

Research Interests: modern Korean literature, ecocriticism, gender and sexuality studies, affect theory

Charlie Curtis

 

Rose Emily DuCharme

 

Isabel Felix Gonzales

 

Jordan Grasso (they/them)

Home Department: Criminology, Law and Society

Research Interests: I explore how safety is conceptualized and practiced in lesbian and queer bars and events in Southern California. In particular, I am interested in how communities that historically (and contemporarily) have not been able to rely on the police construct their own prefigurative systems of safety in an effort to rethink the role of law enforcement specifically, and the state more broadly. I also study topics related to police violence, police legitimacy, queer criminology, and queer spacemaking through a new abolitionist lens.

Toni Hays (she/her/hers)

Home Department: English

In my research, I examine the confluence of American Imperialism in Asia and its effect on housing and familial formations in Asian/American literature and culture. By centralizing the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 in my research, I analyze how U.S. Cold War strategies in Asia extend earlier modes of de-formalizing imperial governance through the extension of liberal democracy and globalizing capital. These research interests also frame my commitments to pedagogical strategies that de-formalize the classroom and account for the reciprocal ways students and instructors work together to create learning environments.

Research Interests: 20th - 21st Century American Literature, post-1965 Asian American and Anglophone Literature and Culture, Global Asias, History and Theory of Home Renovation, literature and culture of the suburb

Donavion Huskey

 

Stefanie Lira

 

 

McKenna Middleton

Home Department: Spanish and Portuguese

Research Interests: 20th century Spanish literature, gender and sexuality studies, dictatorship and exile, memory studies, motherhood studies, feminist epistemologies.

Amanda Mixon

Mixon's research and teaching interests include 20th-century U.S. literature and film, gender and sexuality studies, and comparative race studies, with specializations in literatures and media of U.S. social movements, multi-ethnic cultural productions about the U.S. south, and the intellectual and institutional history of queer theory. Their dissertation, Queerer, My God, to Thee: Twentieth-Century White Southern Lesbian Writers & Anti-Racist Praxis, frames Lillian Smith (1897-1966), Rita Mae Brown (1944-), Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946-), Mab Segrest (1949-), and Dorothy Allison (1949-) as a distinct political tradition whose concern with how people are trained to inhabit and (re)produce whiteness radically departs from anti-racist political thought and activism among white southern women of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project is currently supported by a 2019-2020 American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship and received archival research funding from Duke University, the University of Virginia, and UCI Humanities Commons.

Tarek Mohamed

 

Sara Newsome

Home Department: East Asian Studies

Mutsumi Ogaki

Home Department: Social Ecology Core Program

Research Interests: Gender bias in legal decision-making; gender and social movements; Japanese feminist activism; online activism; hashtag; virtual world

Jessica Pruett

 

Research Interests: Jessica’s research interests include queer theory, new media, affect theory, crip theory, trauma studies, lesbian fandom, gender and sexuality studies, and performance studies.

Anandi Rao

 

 

Bianca Rubalcava

 

Anat Schwartz

 

Home Department: East Asian Studies

Anat is a doctoral candidate in East Asian Studies. Anat's research takes an interdisciplinary approach to contemporary South Korean feminist activism and communities, paying particular attention to the intersections of feminist spaces on and off social media.

Research Interests: gender and sexuality studies, contemporary South Korean society and culture, feminist epistemology, and cultural theory.

Jianmin Shao

Home Department: Psychological Science

Research Interests: feminist psychology, queer anthropology, adolescent development, parent-child relations, China and globalization

Alex Wolff

Alex Wolff is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). They received their M.A. in Anthropology from UCI, and their B.A. in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Their research examines intersections among economic insecurity, temporality,  and sexuality, through a focus on the political activism  of LGBTQ+ young adults in South Korea.

Research Interests: issues of political participation, governance, citizenship, gender, and sexuality in South Korea. 

Nima Yolmo