Category: Former
Altha Cravey
Altha J. Cravey’s (emerita) work explores globalization livelihoods, and labor geographies from a feminist perspective using ethnography, political economy and collaborative video documentaries. She has expertise in Mexico, Mexican development policies, NAFTA, and Mexican working class experiences in the United States South. She has published in Feminist Formations, Ethnography, Economic Geography, Social and Cultural Geography, Antipode, and also published a book, Women and Work in Mexico’s Maq … Read more
Anne Dancausse
Anne Dancausse (she/her) was a 2024-2025 Undergraduate LSP Student Ambassador. She is a UNC undergraduate student studying Human Development and Family Sciences with a double minor in Latinx and Sexuality Studies. Originally from Charlotte, NC, she is a second-generation Cuban American whose deep admiration and love for her cultural history has led her to become a part of UNC’s Latinx Studies Program. In her free time, Anne loves to read, paint, and long-distance run. Her main areas of interest … Read more
Carly Schnitzler
Carly Schnitzler graduated with a PhD from the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2023. Her dissertation is on the rhetorics and poetics of automation, her research and writing focuses more broadly on the intersections of rhetoric, experimental poetics, labor practices, and digital infrastructures. Her scholarly work has been published or is forthcoming in electronic book review, Textshop Experiments, The CEA Critic, and The Geo … Read more
China Medel
Dr. Medel’s research and teaching interests include visual media studies, performance, U.S.-Mexico border studies, Chicana/o and Latina/o literature and art, hemispheric and transnational American Studies, social movements, and transnational feminism. Her research focuses on the role of art and media in imagining and generating new modes of political recognition in the Americas. Her dissertation “Border Images and Imaginaries: Spectral Aesthetics and Visual Medias of Americanity at the U.S.-Mexi … Read more
Chloe Hamer
Chloe Hamer was a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill. Her research centers around questions of collective memory, class, and political resistance in postcolonial Caribbean literatures, with a specific focus on the relationship between anti-global capitalist activism and literary form. Chloe’s dissertation (which won the departmental dissertation award for 2024) explored depictions of labor in contemporary Haitian and Haitian diasporic novels, e … Read more
Dailihana Alfonseca
Afro-Caribbean-American writer Dailihana Alfonseca completed her master’s in Health Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2024. Her concentration in Literature, Medicine, and Culture continues to amplify marginalized perspectives through her writing and research on the Im/Migrant experiences within America. Focusing on the colonial impacts of the past, she writes prose fiction, poetry, and essays that help teach about immigrant experiences with … Read more
J. Michelle Gil Munoz
Michelle Gil was a 2024-2025 Undergraduate LSP Student Ambassador. During that year, she was currently a Senior at UNC, double majoring in Biology and Medical Anthropology with the Latina/o Studies Minor. She was on a pre-med track, and hopes to become a physician. Michelle was born and raised in Venezuela, and moved to the United States about 9 years ago. Some of her hobbies include Reading, Writing, Playing with her cat, Running, and playing the guitar. Some of Michelle’s favorite memories at … Read more
James Cobb
James Cobb was a PhD candidate and teaching fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research looks at the erasure of black subjectivity in contemporary fiction and the inherent difficulty of representing black life as both subject and object. He explores this relationship in evaluating the texts of Percival Everett and Paul Beatty through contemporary Social Ontology and Ordinary Language Philosophy.
Kiara Rodriguez
Kiara Rodriquez was an LSP ambassador from 2023-2025. At UNC, Kiara majors in Human Development and Family Science with a double minor in Women and Gender Studies and Sexuality Studies. She is a proud Boricua who is interested in Caribbean culture, history, and diaspora. As a first-generation college student, seeing her culture be represented in higher education is important to her. Kiara joined the Latina/o Studies Program after gaining the opportunity to present in their Coastal Voices Symposi … Read more
Laura Halperin
Dr. Halperin was an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Program in Latina/o Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, and was affiliated with the Department of American Studies and the Curriculum in Global Studies. She was also the Academic Director of N.C. Sli (the Scholars’ Latinx Initiative), a mentorship and leadership program that pairs UNC undergraduates with Latinx high school students and that is built on principles of recognition, affirmation, and equit … Read more
Marcy Pedzwater
Marcy Pedzwater is an Instructional Designer at Vanderbilt University. With over five years of experience teaching and working in higher education, Marcy is passionate about creating and supporting high-quality learning experiences for students. Prior to joining Vanderbilt, she worked for the Latina/o Studies Program an Writing and Learning Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from UNC and a B.A. in Literature and a B. … Read more
Meleena Gil
Meleena (they/them) is a first-generation US-American and PhD in English and Comparative Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill. Meleena has vested interests in queer theory and gender studies, environmental humanities, and disability studies. Drawing from a reproductive justice framework, Meleena specializes in the representations of children in contemporary Latinx literature. They graduated in 2025 and secured a tenure-track position at Elon University!
Nicole Berland
Nicole Berland (she/they) graduated from the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Chapel Hill in 2023, where she completed a dissertation on narrative seriality in contemporary science fiction television. She is especially passionate about her teaching, for which she has earned four university teaching awards and two external grants. Her auxiliary interests in social justice, music, visual art, and Spanish language learning keep her busy with a number of local, national, and inter … Read more
Nikki Roulo
Nikki Roulo was a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses primarily upon early modern literature and in particular, the intersections of poetics and performance, the fool figure, ballads and politics. Nikki is a lecturer in the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. Click here to check out Nikki’s Writing in the Social Sciences Unit Assignment, focused on Latina/o cultural … Read more
Oswaldo Estrada
Dr. Estrada was at UNC until 2025. His research focuses on gender formation and transgression, historical memory, and the construction of dissident identities in contemporary Latina/o American Literature. He regularly taught a first-year seminar on Mexican and Latina women, titled “Mexican Women across Borders and Genres,” and also an upper division course, titled “Violence in Contemporary Latina/o American Literature.” He has published articles on Peruvian American author Daniel Alarcón, and al … Read more
Susan Harbage Page
Harbage Page is a visual artist whose research focuses on social justice issues concerning race, surveillance, and militarized borders. Her work is extremely diverse both in substance, form, and media and can be roughly divided into “The U.S–Mexico Border Project” which includes the “Anti-Archive of Trauma on the U.S.-Mexico Border” with circa 1000 objects (2007-present) and “Textiles: A Metaphorical Tracing” (2012-present). Both bodies of work focus on archives, how they shape our histories, wh … Read more