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 Founding Director of Latina/o Studies Program, Eugene H. Falk Distinguished Professor
Department of English and Comparative Literature
María DeGuzmánDirectorMaría 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
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Ylce IrizarryAdvisory BoardMy research areas include all things Latinx, including Chicanx and Latinx and cultural production, Hispanic transnational literatures, Caribbean historical fiction, Visual Rhetorics, and Testimonio. Generally, I am interested in what and why: what representations of Latin@ experience look like and why authors have made the specific generic, linguistic, and visual choices that ultimately appear in their work. My most significant publication is my book, Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction: The New Memo … Read more
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Tanya ShieldsAdvisory BoardDr. Shields’ research and teaching on the Caribbean may be of particular interest to students pursuing a certificate in Latina/o Studies. In addition to her research (see Bodies and Bones: Feminist Rehearsal and Imagining Caribbean Belonging and The Legacy of Eric Williams: Into the Postcolonial Moment), she teaches two relevant courses that include readings and material from cultural producers in the Caribbean and Latina/o artists in the US: WMST 350: Spitting in the Wind: American Women, Art, … Read more
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Susan Harbage PageAdvisory BoardHarbage 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
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 Professor of Creative Nonfiction
Creative Writing Program, Department of English & Comparative Literature
Stephanie Elizondo GriestAdvisory BoardA Chicana from South Texas, Stephanie Elizondo Griest is the author of three travel memoirs that explore Latina/o cultural identity: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines; and All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands. She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Oxford American, VQR, and The Believer, and her reporting has won a Richard Margolis Award for Social Justice. Here at UNC-Chapel … Read more
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Roxana Pérez-MéndezAdvisory BoardRoxana Pérez-Méndez is a video performance and installation artist who creates work about the arbitrary nature of contemporary identity through the lens of her own experience as a Puerto Rican woman.
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Rosa PerelmuterAdvisory BoardDr. Perelmuter created and taught regularly for many years a first-year honors seminar about Latin@ literature and culture (ROML 055H, “Writing with an accent: Latino Literature and Culture”), which is now being taught by other colleagues in Romance Studies. In this course, one of the first about Latin@ literature to be offered at UNC, students are exposed to the many faces/ethnicities of Hispanics living in the United States and their literary and cultural production. She now regularly teaches … Read more
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 Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies
Department of Romance Studies
Oswaldo EstradaAdvisory BoardDr. Estrada’s research focuses on gender formation and transgression, historical memory, and the construction of dissident identities in contemporary Latina/o American Literature. He regularly teaches 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 also on Mexican writers Da … Read more
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 Assistant Professor
African, African American & Diaspora Studies
Maya BerryAdvisory BoardA third-generation Cuban American, Maya J. Berry is a dancer, performance scholar, and social anthropologist. She brings a Black feminist approach to her research on race, gender, and the Black political imagination in Havana, Cuba. Her first book, tentatively titled “Forming Rumba: Havana’s Black Corporeal Undercommons,” is an ethnography which analyzes Black popular dance as a window into the everyday struggles experienced by rumberos as they navigate the changing socioeconomic landscape of po … Read more
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 Associate Professor
Department of English & Comparative Literature. Affiliated with the Department of American Studies and Curriculum in Global Studies
Laura HalperinAdvisory BoardDr. Halperin is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Program in Latina/o Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, and she is affiliated with the Department of American Studies and the Curriculum in Global Studies. She is 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 equi … Read more
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Krista PerreiraAdvisory BoardDr. Perreira is a health economist who studies disparities in health, education, and economic well-being and inter-relationships between family, health and social policy. Focusing on children in immigrant families, her most recent work combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies to study migration from Latin America and the health and educational consequences of migration. Through her research, she aims to develop programs and policies to improve the well-being of immigrant families and … Read more
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Juan Carlos González EspitiaAdvisory BoardDr. González Espitia is a scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American and Latina/o literature. His research focuses on non-canonical, heterodox, shunned and hidden literature, ideas, and authors that, although excluded, reveal very profound trends in culture and society. Dr. González Espitia’s research treats representations of disease, literature that challenges the status quo, and nation-building—in particular the complex, dynamic transformation from a colonial condition to one … Read more
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Juan ÁlamoAdvisory BoardJuan Álamo is an Associate Professor at the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Music and a William Wilson Brown, Jr. Distinguished Term Associate Professor in Latin American Studies. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music and a Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees with Jazz as a related field from the University of North Texas. Originally from Cidra, Puerto Rico, Dr. Álamo has presented master classes and/or recitals at the Percussive Arts Society … Read more
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 Class of 1989/William C. Friday Distinguished Professor and Assistant Dean for Honors Carolina
Department of Geography
Gabriela ValdiviaAdvisory BoardGabriela Valdivia is a professor in the Department of Geography at UNC-Chapel Hill and Assistant Dean at Honors Carolina. Gabriela is a feminist political ecologist examining the relationship between resources and socio-environmental inequities. Her research and teaching focus on how environmental injustices shape everyday life experiences and decisions in the Americas. She is an author of the digital project Crude Entanglements, which explores the affective dimensions of oil production; a co … Read more
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Elyse CrystallAdvisory BoardDr. Crystall teaches “Literature and Cultural Diversity: Transmigrations” which takes as its point of departure Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the “contact zone,” the site where those who come into contact are changed by the encounter. The texts consist of narratives that move across time and history; space and geography; gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationality and challenge notions of what is defined (culturally) as normal, natural, accepted, and customary – that is, the standard agains … Read more
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China MedelAdvisory BoardDr. 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
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 Druscilla French Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies
Department of Women’s and Gender Studies
Ariana E. VigilAdvisory BoardDr. Vigil is a professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. My teaching and research focus on U.S. Latinx literature and culture. In particular, I examine how gender, race, sexuality, and class are deployed in various national and transnational contexts. My first book, War Echoes: Gender and Militarization in U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production (Rutgers University Press, 2014) analyzes how U.S. Latinx authors and activists responded t … Read more
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Angela StuesseAdvisory BoardAngela Stuesse is broadly interested in social inequality, and her research and teaching interests include globalization, migration, race, labor, human rights, and methodologies of activist research. Her book Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South (University of California Press 2016), explores how new Latino migration into Mississippi’s poultry industry has impacted communities and prospects for worker organizing. It is based on six years of activist research engage … Read more
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Adam VersényiAdvisory BoardAdam Versényi is Professor of Dramaturgy in the Department of Dramatic Art and Senior Dramaturg for PlayMakers Repertory Company. He Chaired the Department from 2014-2022. A theatre scholar, dramaturg, critic, translator, and director, he is the author of Theatre in Latin America: Religion, Politics, and Culture From Cortés to the 1980s (Cambridge University Press), The Theatre of Sabina Berman: The Agony of Ecstasy and Other Plays (Southern Illinois University Press), Ramón Griffero: Your Desi … Read more
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Kathleen DuValAffiliated FacultyKathleen DuVal earned her Ph.D. in history at the University of California-Davis, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she is a Professor. Her most recent book is Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (Random House, 2015), which tells the history of the Spanish in the American Revolution. She is also the author of The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (P … Read more
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 Teaching Associate Professor
Department of African/African American and Diaspora Studies
Joseph JordanAffiliated FacultyJoseph Jordan’s work focuses on diaspora social justice movements and the cultural politics of race, identity and artistic production in the diaspora. Selected published work includes: Cabral, Solidarity and the African Diaspora in the Americas in Cabral no Cruzamento de Épocas: Comunicações e Discursos Produzidos no II Simpósio Internacional Amílcar Cabral (2013); Can the Artist Speak? Hamid Kachmar’s Subverise Redemptive Art of Resistance in Bodies of Knowledge: Interviews, African Art, and S … Read more
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 Associate Director of The Institute for the Study of the Americas; Director of the Latino Migration Project
The Institute for the Study of the Americas
Hannah GillAffiliated FacultyHannah Gill is an anthropologist with a specialization in Latin American and Caribbean migration studies. She received a DPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, England and a BA from UNC Chapel Hill. She directs the Latino Migration Project at UNC Chapel Hill, a public educational program on Latin American immigration and integration in North Carolina. She is the author of the book, North Carolina and the Latino Migration Experience: New Roots in the Old North State. Nuevas R … Read more
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David GarciaAffiliated FacultyDavid Garcia’s research focuses on the music of the Americas with an emphasis on African diasporic and Latin music. His publications include Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music (Temple University Press, 2006) and Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins (Duke University Press, 2017). He is currently editing a critical reader on the history of Latin music, dance, and theater in the United States, 1783-1900.
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Victoria ValleStaffVictoria 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
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Ryan CarrollAffiliated Graduate Teaching Fellows, StaffRyan 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.
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René MarzukStaffRene 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
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 Graduate Teaching Fellow
English and Comparative Literature
Meleena GilAffiliated Graduate Teaching Fellows, StaffMeleena (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
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Joshua Cody WardAffiliated Graduate Teaching Fellows, StaffJoshua 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
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Thomas Eric SimonsonAffiliated Graduate Teaching FellowsThomas Eric Simonson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their research focuses primarily upon early modern literature, especially works engaging with concepts of cosmology at the intersection of literature and scientific writing. They also have interests in queer theory, film studies and visual art, and cultural studies.
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 Graduate Teaching Fellow
English and Comparative Literature
Sejal MahendruAffiliated Graduate Teaching FellowsMy research focuses on environmental justice in the Anthropocene. I am interested in the convergences in the fields of ecocriticism, post-colonial theory and global socioeconomics, to examine how the effects of climate change, displacement, toxic and electronic waste, and resource extraction are differentially experienced across the Global North and South. I am also interested in studying environmental advocacy through the intersections between art and activism in grassroots movements. I study g … Read more
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Rose SteptoeAffiliated Graduate Teaching FellowsRose Steptoe is Ph.D. candidate, teaching fellow, and film scholar in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the intersection of feminist authorship and cinematic depictions of body horror. More broadly, she is interested in genre and horror studies, gender and sexuality, and sound studies.
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Nikki RouloAffiliated Graduate Teaching FellowsNikki Roulo is 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. Click here to check out Nikki’s Writing in the Social Sciences Unit Assignment, focused on Latina/o cultural practices.
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 Graduate Teaching Fellow
English and Comparative Literature
Mindy Buchanan-KingAffiliated Graduate Teaching FellowsMindy Buchanan-King (she/her) is pursuing her Ph.D. in English Literature at UNC Chapel Hill and is a teaching fellow. Mindy is originally from Virginia and received her B.A. from Emory & Henry College and her M.A. from the College of Charleston. Her master’s thesis focused on Edith Wharton’s use of Romanticism in conceptualizing the artistic self in Hudson River Bracketed. Her graduate research is currently focused on questions of photography and medicine in late 19th-/early 20th-century U. … Read more
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Lindsay Ragle-MillerAffiliated Graduate Teaching FellowsLindsay Ragle-Miller is currently a first-year PhD student at the University of North-Carolina at Chapel Hill, who teaches ENGL 105, the introductory composition course. In research, Lindsay is interested in Medieval Studies, particularly through the lenses of Disability Studies and Queer Studies. She earned a BA in English with Teacher’s Certification from Eastern Illinois University in 2009. Even then, Lindsay was interested in Medieval Studies, as one of the first students to earn an interdis … Read more
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Leslie RowenAffiliated Graduate Teaching FellowsLeslie Rowen is a third year PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. There, she focuses on 20th Century American Literature of War, especially soldier writings composed during wartime. In 2017, she received her B.A. in English and Spanish from Bellarmine University in Louisville, KY. During her time at Bellarmine, she studied for a semester at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Quito, Ecuador, where she took classes in Spanish and Ecuador’s history. Between he … Read more
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Krysten VoelknerAffiliated Graduate Teaching FellowsKrysten Voelkner is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow in the department of English and Comparative Literature. Her primary interests reside at the intersection of environmental humanities and contemporary Latinx literature. Recent publications of hers can be found in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, and Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures. She is currently at work on her dissertation, which investigates the ways in which Latinx wri … Read more
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Krista TelfordAffiliated Graduate Teaching FellowsKrista Telford is a PhD student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill studying English Literature. She specializes in medieval literature and is particularly focused on religious texts. Her research examines prayer and depictions of the afterlife in medieval literature. She aims to take an interdisciplinary approach to her study of religious writings, considering the performative aspect of many poems and prayers and drawing on musicological research.
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Jo KlevdalAffiliated Graduate Teaching FellowsJo Klevdal is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literatures where she studies 20th century literature. Her primary interests relate to various understandings of memory and their relationship to both language and image. For her current work, she examines the intersection of photography and literature in the early 20th century. Jo is originally from Colorado and holds a M.A. from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Click here to check out Jo’s Writing in the Social Scienc … Read more
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Izzy HowardAffiliated Graduate Teaching FellowsIzzy Howard (they/them) researches ambiguous and deceptive language in Medieval literature and how this ‘promiscuity’ of meaning can be read as queer. Their readings focus on the textual body and its relation to the physical body: how the textual corpus compares to the physical corpus, and how this relationship between language, text, and body can be queered. Medieval theories of language and rhetoric inform their investigation, alongside structuralist and post-structuralist criticism. Their bro … Read more
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emilio Jesús Taiveaho PeláezAffiliated Graduate Teaching Fellowsemilio Taiveaho Peláez is an investigative poet and scholar based in the Piedmont of North Carolina. Their word-work emerges from flesh-eye experiences within the living archive of the North American landscape and seeks to grapple with the colonial legacies that shape this environment—from sidewalks to national parks to the common places of lyric poetry. Their dissertation, “The Mushrooms of Language: The Entangled Poetics of María Sabina, Anne Waldman, & Cecilia Vicuña,” probes experimental … Read more
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Eleanor RamboAffiliated Graduate Teaching FellowsEleanor Rambo is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she specializes in 20th and 21st-century American and Russian-language literature. Her work explores how literature functions as a marker of identity, as well as cultural and economic systems’ influence on the novel. Her writing has appeared in the publications World Literature Today and The Common, and she is currently the Managing Editor of The Carolina Quarterly.
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Chloe HamerAffiliated Graduate Teaching FellowsChloe Hamer is 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 aims to explore depictions of labor in contemporary Haitian and Haitian diasporic novels, examining the ways in which these novels make use of … Read more
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 Graduate Teaching Fellow
English and Comparative Literature
Anna Broadwell-GuldeAffiliated Graduate Teaching FellowsAnna Broadwell-Gulde (she/her) is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research examines the influence of portraiture—painting and photographic—on modernist innovations in representations of consciousness. Prior to joining the English department, Anna lived and taught English in northern Brazil, where she fell in love with the people, culture, and dance. Through the LSP grant, she devel … Read more
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 Graduate Teaching Fellow
English and Comparative Literature
Nicole BerlandFormerNicole Berland (she/they) is a Doctoral Candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Chapel Hill, where she is currently completing 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 … Read more
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Marcy PedzwaterFormerMarcy 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
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James CobbFormerJames Cobb is 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.
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Dailihana AlfonsecaFormerAfro-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
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Carly SchnitzlerFormerCarly Schnitzler is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Currently writing a dissertation 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 CE … Read more
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Altha CraveyFormerAltha 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
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