Contributors 

Aycan Akçamete is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, Program in Comparative Literature. She completed her Master’s degree in British Cultural Studies at Hacettepe University and worked as a theater critic for various publications in Turkey. Her doctoral project explores the role of theater critics as public intellectuals in shaping a theater production, with case studies from Arcola Theater in London and Talimhane Tiyatrosu in Istanbul. She recently contributed a chapter to the edited collection on the playwright Zinnie Harris, looking into the reception of How to Hold Your Breath in Istanbul and London.

Annie Bares is a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been published in MELUS and the E3W Review of Books.

Bryanna Barrera is a second-year PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her current research uses interdisciplinary methods combining Literary Studies, Latinx Studies, and Environmental Studies to investigate the connections between the US Latinx migrant experience, the literature that narrates it, and the environmental world that affects and is affected by increases in Latin America-US migrancy. She is particularly interested in the experiences of migrant farm and factory laborers, affect, and speculative fiction.

Tia Katheryne Butler is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Texas in Austin. Her dissertation, “Haiti in Hollywood: Popular Culture and Representation” examines Haiti’s treatment in US film and television since the dawn of the Hollywood system. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Tia loves spending her free time reading (or watching) historical fiction or walking her dogs.

Michal Calo is a PhD student in the Department of English and a graduate portfolio student in the Center for Women’s & Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on twentieth-century American women’s representations of the body in works of literature as they contend with sociocultural and medical conceptions of gender, sexuality, race, and disability.

Oscar G. Chaidez is a second-year PhD student in the Program of Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Oscar specializes in Border Studies and queer Latin American literature and film. 

Joshua L. Crutchfield is a scholar of twentieth-century Black freedom movements, intellectual history and carceral studies. He is currently a PhD student in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin where he’s working on his dissertation tentatively titled, “Imprisoned Black Women Intellectuals: Mae Mallory, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur and Safiya Bukhari and the Struggle for Abolition, 1961-1890.”

Haley Eazor is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include contemporary US poetry and poetics, ecopoetry, environmental criticism, multi-ethnic feminist studies, and critical race theory.

Brice Ezell is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studies modern and contemporary drama and theatre. His dissertation, The Theatre of Clarity: Analytic Philosophy in American and English Drama, surveys the work of four playwrights spanning 1890 to the present, as their work relates to the analytic tradition in philosophy. His scholarship appears in Modern Drama and The Eugene O’Neill Review. He is also a critic of music, film, and television, with bylines at outlets such as PopMatters and Consequence of Sound. 

Zachariah Ezer is an MFA Playwriting Candidate & James A. Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. His work animates theoretical quandaries through dramaturgical forms, and his artistic project is the development of an Afropessimist aesthetics, in order to find a way to represent the narrative arc of the slave.

Kathleen Field is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin in the Program for Comparative Literature. Her research interests include twentieth and twenty-first century Caribbean and Gulf Coast literature, racialized geographies, and the environmental humanities. 

Daisy E. Guzmán Nuñez is a second-year PhD student in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies. Her research focuses on the Transnational experience of Garifuna women from Guatemala to New York City. Daisy’s work uses Black feminist anthropological methods to discuss Afro-indigeneity geography and self-making.

Alhelí Harvey is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Mexican-American and Latino Studies at UT Austin. Her research seeks to learn from how people create and interact with artifacts that speak to their experiences of belonging in a given place. She looks at built environment history, and land art installations, and DIY projects.

Emma Hetrick (she/her) is a second year in the dual-degree Master’s program in the Departments of English and Information Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests lie at the intersection of transatlantic print culture, adaptation, and American identity formation within a historical context.

Xuan An Ho is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She researches twentieth-century and contemporary fiction and poetry, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film. Her current project is on art production in the Southeast Asian diaspora.

Lindsey Holmes is a second-year PhD student in The Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her interests are nineteenth and early twentieth century African American and British literature, the spatial humanities and Black geographies.

Hannah Hopkins is a PhD student in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies our storytelling with and around data, data centers, and networked technologies. 

I. B. Hopkins is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also earned a MFA in Playwriting. His research interests include transatlantic drama, performance and coloniality, early American South(s), adaptation, and new play dramaturgy. 

Jeremy D. Horne is a third-year doctoral student at The University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Education Policy and Planning. His research draws on Black Critical Theory to examine how Black students exist, persist, and resist within educational contexts premised on anti-Black racism. More specifically, Jeremy uses critical qualitative methods to examine the effects of gentrification on historically Black school-communities, and how associated neighborhood changes affect Black students’ wellbeing. The University Council for Educational Administration recently named Jeremy as a 2020-2022 Barbara L. Jackson Scholar.

Jaden Janak is a PhD candidate in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Their dissertation project focuses on prison abolitionist experiments of the twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries. In their free time, they serve as an instructor at Lockhart Correctional Facility and organize with local and national collectives. They received their MA from UT-Austin and are a Donald D. Harrington Graduate Fellow.  

Taylor Johnson Karahan is a doctoral student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Their research interests include the critical study of race, gender, and sexuality; US imperialism and settler-colonial state-building; state regulation of Indigenous domestic structures and intimate relationships; African American history and the Black radical tradition; and contested representations of Indigenous peoples.

Jakapat Koohapremkit is a second-year PhD student in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin. Their research interests include Victorian literature, race and the empire, gender and sexuality, and cultural studies. 

Candice Lyons is an Austin-based educator and PhD candidate in The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of African and African Diaspora Studies. She received her BA in Philosophy and her MA in Women’s and Gender Studies also from UT Austin. Her research interests include Black women’s history, Black queer theory and Black feminist theory. Lyons’s recent pieces “A (Queer) Rebel Wife in Texas” (2020) and “Rage and Resistance at Ashbel Smith’s Evergreen Plantation” (2020) can be found on the public history site Not Even Past and her article “Behind the Scenes: Elizabeth Keckley, Slave Narratives, and the Queer Complexities of Space” (2021) is forthcoming in Feminist Studies.

Sophia Monegro is a doctoral student in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Monegro is also a Research Assistant for the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute and a Mellon Mays Fellow. She is a budding literary scholar working at the intersection of Slavery Studies, Black Women’s Studies, and Caribbean Studies. Her work has been published in Oxford Bibliographies and the E3W Review of Books. Monegro’s dissertation project traces a genealogy of Black women’s radical thought in the archive and in print culture about XIX century Haiti and the Dominican Republic. 

Christopher Ndubuizu is a second-year doctoral candidate in the Department of African & African Diaspora Studies at UT Austin. His research focuses on the acculturation and health outcomes of African immigrants in the United States. Christopher’s experience working in the non-profit, private, and public sectors plays a vital role in his research interests. As a Certified Health Education Specialist, Christopher integrates his public health and policy development training into his doctoral research. For fun, Christopher enjoys reading, traveling, and writing short stories.  

Kate Nelson (she/her) is a third-year PhD student in French Studies at UT. She previously received her MA in French and Francophone Literature from California State University Long Beach and her BFA in Film Production with a minor in French from Chapman University. Her research interests include race, gender, & class, cinema, and 20th- and 21st-century literature.

Jackie Pedota is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. Jackie’s research broadly focuses on equity and access for Latino/a/x students, and her dissertation will explore how university counterspaces facilitate Latino/a/x identity development at Predominantly White Institutions. She uses an interdisciplinary approach in her work and incorporates participatory methodologies when working with Latino/a/x communities to uplift their voices and experiences. 

Iana Robitaille is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies post-1945 transnational American literature and culture, global migration, postcolonial theory, and US empire, with a particular focus on narrative negotiations of heritage and inheritance.

Debarati Roy is a third-year graduate student at the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include film, ecocriticism, object and thing theories, and critical aesthetic theories.

Jessica S. Samuel, PhD, is a Black Caribbean woman who hails from the US Virgin Islands with roots all throughout the wider region. She is a scholar-activist who studies race, education, colonialism, and the environment, including where they all might converge, in the US and abroad. Jessica has several years of activism experience. Prior to obtaining her PhD in American Studies from Boston University, she taught high school English and Writing as a Teach for America corps member in St. Louis, Missouri. She is an alumna of the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers Fellowship program and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. In 2018, after serving as an education policy fellow, she was appointed to the Racial Imbalance Advisory Council of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Jennifer Sapio was born and raised in Austin, Texas. She earned a Bachelor’s degree from Barnard College, and a PhD from the University of Texas. She is currently pursuing an MFA from New York University. Dr. Sapio was shortlisted for the Doug Draime Prize for Poetry (2020) and the Writer’s Advice flash memoir contest (2019). You can see her publications at Medium, The Write Launch, Sonder Midwest, Raw Art Review, Chattahoochee Review, jennisapio.com, and elsewhere. She also volunteers for the Inside Literature program at the Travis County Correctional Complex and the Girls Empowerment Network. 

Alina Scott is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Coyote Shook is a PhD student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. Their research examines land speculation through an eco-disability lens in south Florida, a project they’re constructing in graphic novel format. They completed their BA in English and Gender Studies at Mercer University, their MSed in English Education at Fordham University, and their MA in Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  

kt shorb is a PhD candidate in the Department of Performance as Public Practice at The University of Texas at Austin. Their research focuses on how queer people of color performers create temporal ruptures that can only be described as time travel. As part of their practice-as-research, they direct and act in theatre shows. 

Gaila Sims is a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation explores how state history museums exhibit on the history of enslavement in the United States. Originally from Riverside, California, she received her MA in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018 and her BA in the Departments of History and African American Studies from Oberlin College in 2011.

S. Frankie Summers is a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies and a portfolio student with the Center for Women and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She conducts community-based participatory ethnographic research informed by feminist anthropological methodologies. Her research is focused on Unitarian Universalists, Beloved Community, and progressive religious activism.

Brie Winnega is a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on contemporary American literature and life writing with an emphasis on disability studies and health humanities. Her current project is a study of care ethics in contemporary memoirs written by nurses in the US.