CONTRIBUTOR BIOS
Aycan Akçamete is a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin, Comparative Literature program. She has an MA degree in English and British cultural studies, with an emphasis on post-war British women playwrights and feminist critical theory. Her doctoral project focuses on the role of theater critics in the reception of intercultural performances in Turkey, England, and the USA. Her latest and forthcoming publication is the Turkish translation of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theater.
Samantha Allan is a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century American literature with an emphasis on citizenship, affective relationships to geography, and memory. She is particularly interested in documentary and archival projects taken up by poets and creative-nonfiction writers.
Shukri Bana is a first-year graduate student in the Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests are apology, writing by youth, contemporary South Africa.
Annie Bares is a third-year doctoral student in English literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include contemporary literature and culture, African American literature, environmental humanities, and critical disability theory. In addition to past issues of the E3W Review of Books, her work has been published in MELUS.
Bryanna Barrera is a first year in the English PhD program and a graduate portfolio student in the Mexican American & Latino/a Studies department. Her research focuses on contemporary Chican@/x fiction, specifically migrant narratives, and its relationship with the environment and affect– specifically geographical boundaries as political borders, Chican@/x environmentalism and pain.
John Paul Bimbiras is a second-year Ph.D. student in Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a B.M. in jazz and classical guitar performance from Towson University (2011), as well as an M.A. in composition from The City College of New York (2016), where he studied with David Del Tredici. After graduating from CCNY, John became a Research Associate at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute and helped the Institute secure a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create an interactive website entitled A History of Dominican Music in the U.S. His research focuses on politics, transnationalism, and the music of the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
Nicholas Bloom is a doctoral student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include the critical study of race and racism; Atlantic slavery and its afterlives; migration and diaspora in the Atlantic world; African American history and the black radical tradition; morality and violence; radical political imaginaries; Marxism; and the US South.
Hayley Braithwaite has just completed her Master’s Degree in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of York. Primarily interested in the gothic literature of the Romantic and Early-Victorian period, Hayley has worked on nineteenth-century vampires, the explained supernatural, and the impact of commercial society on gothic fiction. She has a particular interest in the Victorian serial writer George Reynolds (who was the subject of her MA dissertation), and is hoping to gain funding for a PhD centred on his work.
Erica Brozovsky is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work in sociolinguistics focuses on language variation and change, particularly on linguistic performance as used in the construction of Asian American identity.
Wilfredo José Burgos Matos is a musician/singer and PhD student in Spanish and Portuguese who specializes in black sounds and sensibilities in contemporary Dominican music and spaces. His academic and artistic work has been presented and published in the United States, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Spain, Cuba, and Haiti.
Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the intersection of modern and contemporary American poetry, poetic theory, and film studies. Her chapter, “”Both in and out of the game, and watching, and wondering at it:” Whitmanic Currents and Complications in He Got Game and “I, Too”” is forthcoming in the anthology Next Generation Adaptation published by the University Press of Mississippi.
Aris Clemons is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, as well as a graduate portfolio student in the Mexican American and Latina/o Studies Department. Her research explores the relationship between language, racial categorizations, and identity for Afro-Latinx immigrants and their children in a variety of contexts.
Kiara Davis is a first year MA student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research explores the ways Black women create and engage with locations and spaces. Her general interests include 20th and 21st century Black feminist writers, Black geographies, and Caribbean Literature.
Claudio Eduardo Oliveira is a PhD student in the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the rhetoric of silence in the Inquisition archives in Spain and Mexico.
Katie Field is a doctoral student in the Program for Comparative Literature. Her research explores the intersections between coloniality, disaster, race, and geography in the Caribbean and Gulf South, with current attention given to Puerto Rico, Louisiana, and New Orleans. She also writes fiction.
Holly Genovese is a PhD student in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also completing Graduate Portfolios in Black Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies. Her dissertation will consider black poetics, life writing, hip hop, and street art by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people in the American South as resistance to the carceral state. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Teen Vogue, The Washington Post, The LA Review of Books, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She has served as co-curator for exhibitions at Eastern State Penitentiary, McKissick Museum, and the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks.
Jeremy Goheen is a graduate student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation examines how nineteenth-century writers gothicized infrastructures in order to make visible the ways in which mundane and seemingly invisible systems/structures simultaneously sustain and threaten to dissolve the promises of modernity.
Daisy E. Guzmán Nuñez is a first 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.
Morgan Hamill is a writer and researcher from Boston. In the fall of 2020, she will begin her graduate studies in English at Penn State. Her research interests include Disability Studies, aging, and cognition.
Tristan Hanson spends a lot of time with comics. When he’s not reading or thinking about them, though, he’s working toward his PhD in the Rhetoric and Writing Department at the University of Texas at Austin and teaching a class called the Rhetoric of Comics. So, even when he’s not reading or thinking about them, he’s reading and thinking about them.
Emily Harring is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies Afro-Caribbean folklore, indigeneity, and the postcolonial gothic. In particular, her work examines how Jamaican literature represents colonial trauma through the reimagining of gothic landscapes. She is an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa Tribe.
Alhelí Harvey is a first-year Ph.D student in the Department of Mexican-American and Latino Studies at UT Austin. Her research is primarily concerned with 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.
Hartlyn Haynes is a PhD student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include cultural memory, surveillance and space, and health and illness, and particularly the ways in which these intersect in sites of public memorialization.
Diana Heredia-López is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at The University of Texas in Austin. She explores the intersections between science and empire in Latin America and the Atlantic World during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her current research focuses on the circulation of dyes, material culture, consumption, and indigenous knowledge in the Spanish Empire.
Emma Hetrick is a first year graduate student at UT-Austin in the dual-degree masters program in English and Information Studies. She works on the reprinting of English literature in America in the 18th and 19th centuries, with a focus on modified American editions of English novels. More generally, she’s interested in conceptions of national identity, transatlantic print culture, and the digital humanities.
Xuan An Ho is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include twentieth-century and contemporary American fiction and poetry, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film.
Lindsey Holmes is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin.
Kerry Knerr is a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation, “Troubling Paradise: Tiki Bars and American Imperial Imaginaries,” explores the material and business history of tiki bars and restaurants as a production of American imperial fantasies. Her research shows how the collective practice of tiki represented a conditional embrace of the Pacific while denying the nuclear-imperial relationship between the US and Pacific nations. This research has been supported by the Culinary Historians of New York, the Coordinating Council on Women in History, and the Les Dames D’Escoffier. In addition, Knerr served as Project Manager at Foodways Texas, a public history non-profit organization that documents and celebrates the stories of Texas food.
Adriana M Linares Palma is a Ph.D. candidate for Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her work is part of a community-based program at the Ixil region, Guatemala, as an ongoing project with Indigenous leaders and students to better understand their ancient past. Her research place in conversation Ixil perspectives and archaeological approaches for the study of the Ixil past.
Rosy Mack is a fourth-year doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of English. Her PhD project is a history of The Women’s Press as a site of feminist culture making. Other scholarly interests include feminist crime and science fiction, feminist theory, critical legal studies, and queer theory.
Montserrat Madariaga-Caro is a doctoral candidate in Iberian and Latin American Languages and Cultures at The University of Texas at Austin. She focuses on Mapuche aesthetics and history, and is interested in the intersection of territory and affect, decolonizing micropolitics, allyship, Indigenous and environmental thought.
Wendyliz Martinez is currently an MA/PhD graduate student at the Pennsylvania State University in the English Department. Her research focuses on how Black Caribbean people create community and visual representations of Black women in different mediums (photographs, illustrations, digital, etc).
Michael Mason is a graduate student in the English department at the University of Texas at Austin. Before coming to UT, Michael studied English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and taught English in the City Colleges of Chicago.
Whitney S. May is pursuing her Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Texas and is an adjunct lecturer for the Department of English at Texas State University. Her primary research interests include the Gothic and nineteenth-century horror literature, as well as depictions of the circus in horror fiction and popular culture. Her related work has been published in The Edgar Allan Poe Review, Gothic Studies, and Supernatural Studies.
Margaret Mendenhall is a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.
Rhya Moffitt Brooke is a PhD student in the English department at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a Master’s degree in English from Northeastern University. Her interests include modern and contemporary Black women writers, the neo-slave narrative, speculative fiction, disability studies, critical race theory, and feminist theory.
Monica Mohseni is a doctoral student in the program of Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the hemispheric cultural transformations and interactions prompted by extractive companies in the Americas. Currently, her work centers around oil as a narrative agent employed by transnational corporations.
Sophia Monegro is a PhD Student in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin and a Research Assistant for the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. Her dissertation project traces Black women’s migration to the Dominican Republic in 19th century travel literature. Her forthcoming publications include: “Dominican Americans” co-authored with Dr. Ramona Hernández in Ilan Stavans’ Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies; and “Travel Accounts about the Dominican Republic 1800-1930” co-authored with Dr. Hernández and Sarah Aponte.
Lauren Nelson is a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her current research focuses on Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature, with particular emphasis on the environmental humanities and postcolonial theory. Her work is forthcoming in the spring 2020 special issue of Feminist Modernist Studies.
Alex Norris is a PhD student in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. His research is on the political economy of development, with an emphasis on the Arabic-speaking world.
Mónica B. Ocasio Vega is a third-year doctoral student in Iberian and Latin American Literatures and Cultures at the University of Texas in Austin. Her current research project focuses on the culinary cultures of Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico as imaginaries for a specific sensible life. She is currently Assistant Instructor of Spanish at UT Austin and is editor of the graduate student magazine Pterodáctilo.
Jermani Ojeda Ludena is a first year PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UT Austin. His work explores the cultural manifestation of Quechua people using their aboriginal language in the south of Peru through local radio stations. His general interest includes Andean cultures, state and community development politics, indigenous radio and media, indigenous education.
Joshua G. Ortiz Baco is a PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin and the Digital Scholarship Lab Manager for the Latin American Digital Initiatives at LLILAS Benson. His work combines digital methodologies in the study of 19th-century abolitionist and racial discourses of periodicals in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Brazil.
Alida Louisa Perrine is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in Brazilian cultural studies and feminist inquiry. Her research centers expressions of black womanhood in contemporary Brazilian activist culture and media that contest both institutional and daily forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia.
Eric Pitty is an experienced writer, editor, researcher, and creative working at the intersection of academia, digital media, content/brand storytelling and the performing arts. Current PhD student in English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin.
Molly Porter is a fifth-year PhD candidate in English at Louisiana State University. Molly is a Victorianist, and her primary interests are neo-Victorian literature, adaptation, and postcolonial theory. She focuses on postcolonial, diasporic, and feminist adaptations of nineteenth-century British novels, exploring how these novels portray and counter narratives of Englishness and English identity.
Bianca Quintanilla is a second-year Ph.D student in Comparative Literature at UT Austin. She studies representations of utopia in Chicana/o literature. Her other research interests include Italian immigrant literature, critical theory, and indigenous epistemologies.
Joshua Kamau Reason is a master’s student at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. Their research focuses on Black LGBTT geographies in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. Using digital mapping, performance analysis, and ethnography, Joshua traces Black LGBTT being throughout the past, present, and future of the city.
Andi T. Remoquillo is a doctoral candidate in American Studies with a focus on Asian American Studies. Her research studies second generation Filipina Americans in the Chicago metro area and the ways in which Fil-Am diasporic communities are gendered.
Jesse Ritner is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. His work focuses on the intersections of environment, capitalism, Indigenous studies, knowledge production, and politics. His dissertation is tentatively titled “Making Snow: Weather, Technology, and the Rise of the American Ski Industry, 1900-present.”
Mariana Rivera is completing her undergraduate degree with majors in English and Mexican American and Latino/a Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. They research the intersection between Chicano/a/x cultural performance, visibility, identity formation, and Mexican holidays. At the graduate level, they intend to pursue a PhD in Latino/a/x Studies.
Hannah Robbins Hopkins is a third-year Master’s degree student pursuing dual degrees in English and Information Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies our storytelling with and around data, data centers, and networked technologies.
Iana Robitaille is a first-year doctoral student in the English graduate program at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work focuses on 20th- and 21st-century literary and cultural production, particularly transnational American and global Anglophone fiction. She earned her B.A. in English and music from Muhlenberg College; prior to returning to graduate study, she worked in publishing and the public art and humanities.
Gabriella Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation focuses on neoslave narratives, particularly on the literary strategies contemporary authors of African descent utilize to imagine the experiences of enslaved human beings.
Pedro J. Rolón Machado is a poet, musician, and Ph.D. candidate and Graduate Student Instructor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. He works in the fields of American and Caribbean poetics between the 19th and 21st ceturies, mysticism, spirituality and decolonial critique, and the transhistorical Baroque. He is currently writing a dissertation that looks at mystical and spiritually-inflected poetic systems of subject formation––and deformation––in the Puerto Rican archipelago between the 19th and 21st centuries.
Ipek Sahinler is a PhD student at the University of Texas At Austin’s Comparative Literature program. She is originally a translator from Istanbul who has worked with Turkish, Spanish, Italian and Latin. In 2017, she received her MSc degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Edinburgh. Her current doctoral research is about the intersections between 20th century Middle Eastern and Latin American Literatures from the perspective of queer theory.
Jessica Sánchez Flores is a third-year graduate student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her research shows how Indigenous women are using everyday actions as forms of knowledge productions to disrupt the imaginaries that have frequently indexed them, by performing their own take on what it means to be an Indigenous woman in a misogynist, racist and colonial contemporary Mexican society.
Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Religious Studies. His dissertation focuses on Nahua ritual specialists by using colonial texts and material culture from the Late Postclassic period.
Ashley Santos has a B.A. in English Languages and Literature from Fayetteville State University. Writing has always been her passion, and she can usually be found reading and studying up on how other authors make their craft. Ms. Santos also loves helping others improve their writing which she does by providing various editorial services for all types of writing, from fiction and non-fiction, to essays, reviews, and reports. Ms. Santos currently works as a research assistant at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute.
Kaila T. Schedeen is a PhD Candidate in Art History at UT Austin with a portfolio in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program. She specializes in contemporary American art with a particular focus on Indigenous artists and artists of the African Diaspora who critically examine the terms of identity, belonging, and nationhood in the United States through photography, performance, and multimedia works.
Diana Silveira Leite is a doctoral candidate in the Program in Comparative Literature at The University of Texas at Austin. She holds a M.A. in British Studies from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and B.A. in English and History with Liberal Arts Honors from The University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation, “Romanticism’s Discontents: Writing Black Personhood in Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” explores the works of early black writers in the 1840s and ‘50s as dissident voices within Brazil’s romanticism.
Gaila Sims is a doctoral candidate in the American Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She is interested in public history and slavery, and her dissertation focuses on interpretation of enslavement at American state history museums.
Juan Tiney Chirix is a doctorate student in Latin American Studies (LLILAS) at the University of Texas at Austin. Before starting their graduate studies at UT Austin (2016), Juan studied their degree in economics at the University of Havana (2009-2014). They got a master’s degree in 2019 of a dual degree in Community and Regional Planning/ Latin American Studies. Juan comes from a family that belongs to two indigenous nations in Guatemala, on their mother’s side is Kaqchikel and on their father’s side is Tzutujil. Juan has also been involved in opening academic spaces for the recognition of indigenous knowledge, especially the indigenous economy.
Camila Torres Castro is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the politics of sound in Mexican film. She is an active member of Chulita Vinyl Club and an avid record collector.
Emma Train is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also serves as the assistant director for the New Writers Project. Her dissertation examines contemporary American ecopoetry from the perspective of queer and feminist theory. Her poetry has been most recently published in the Colorado Review and is forthcoming in the Berkeley Poetry Review.
Tiana Wilson is a doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also working on a Women’s and Gender Studies portfolio. Her broader research interests include: Black Women’s Internationalism, Black Women’s Intellectual History, Women of Color Organizing, and Third World Feminism. At UT, she is the Graduate Research Assistant for the Institute for Historical Studies, coordinator of the New Work in Progress Series, and a research fellow for the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.
Erin Yanota is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree with Honors from McGill University in Montreal, QC, Canada, and her Master of Arts degree from UT Austin. Before beginning her graduate work at UT, she worked at the Opera Kelowna Society in Kelowna, BC, Canada, as that non-profit organization’s operations manager. Her current research focuses on transatlantic women’s modernisms and poetry and poetics.
