Category: Staff
María DeGuzmán
María DeGuzmán is the Eugene H. Falk Professor of English & Comparative Literature and Founding Director of the UNC Latina/o Studies Program of the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She is the author of three books: Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (University of Minnesota Press, August 2005), Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night (Indiana University Press, June 2012), and Understanding John Rechy (Univers … Read more
Dailihana Alfonseca
Afro-Caribbean-American writer Dailihana Alfonseca is currently working on her master’s in Health Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. 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 experience … Read more
Joshua Cody Ward
Joshua Cody Ward specializes in Literature of the American South, African American Literature, and Chicanx literature, especially across the 20th century. He is a Digital Content Coordinator for the Latina/o Studies Program, a member of the Thomas Wolfe Society Board of Directors (2023-2026), and on the planning committee for the 2024 Thomas Wolfe Society Durham, NC conference. He is also the Coordinator for CoLEAGS’s Graduate Lecture Series and a Junior Coordinator for the Critical Speaker Seri … Read more
Meleena Gil
Meleena (they/she) is a first-generation US-American and college graduate now working towards a doctoral degree in English and Comparative Literature at 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. Meleena is a teaching fellow in DOECL and in Women’s and Gender Studies. They … Read more
René Marzuk
Rene Marzuk is a first-year graduate student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and a Royster Fellow at UNC. He is interested in literary articulations of marginalized identities as well as in literary instances of emergence, widely defined. He is a contributing editor of The Envious Lobster, an open-access anthology of nineteenth-century U.S. nature writing and environmental writing for children. He also collaborates with the feminist literary collective Writers Resist as a … Read more
Ryan Carroll
Ryan Carroll is a PhD student in English and Comparative Literature and a Program Assistant with the Latina/o Studies Program. He researches nineteenth-century information culture and literary theory
Victoria Valle
Victoria Valle is a Digital Content Coordinator for the Latina/o Studies Program. Her interests include the Digital Humanities, Speculative Fiction, and Latina/o literature, specifically Mexican-American literature and authors from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries. She recently participated in the 8th International Literary Juvenilia Conference, presenting her research on the literary juvenilia written by Mexican-American author Josephina Niggli (1910-1983). When she’s not working, Vict … Read more