Celebrating Humanities Graduates

For Jared Childress, graduating from UCI is a victory nearly 16 years in the making. Childress first matriculated at UCI in 2006 with dreams of becoming a professional dancer, but after changing his aspirations and weathering a series of personal struggles, he left in 2012 without his degree.

For nearly a decade, Childress “lived life, working odd jobs” at bookstores and after-school programs — until March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic derailed his career plans and prompted his decision to go back to school. After returning to UCI, Childress “found a home” in the African American studies department, where he could explore history and political science from the perspective of marginalized groups. Though he ultimately decided to major in African American studies, the aspiring writer found a second home in the literary journalism program. A “life-changing” assignment in an introductory reporting class — to interview an elected official in his hometown — led to the publication of Childress’s first piece in The Sacramento Observer. Childress has since been hired as a full-time reporter at the historically Black newspaper.

In addition to continuing his career in journalism, Childress hopes eventually to publish nonfiction books interrogating race and social justice, and to open an independent nonprofit bookstore of his own. His journey to the commencement stage was “long and rarely easy,” Childress says, “but I wouldn’t change a thing about it — that long road served me as a student and made me a better, more compassionate journalist.”

For book-lover Christina Acevedo, majoring in English was an obvious choice, as she had always enjoyed discussing literature and becoming “more critical and inquisitive” in the process. While at UCI, Acevedo was inspired by her Mexican grandparents to add a second major in Spanish, through which she hoped to develop her Spanish language skills and learn more about Latin American culture and literature.

Such cultural research quickly became a passion for Acevedo: For her Humanities Honors Program thesis, Acevedo wrote about government-sanctioned violence in contemporary Latin American novels; she participated in Ballet Folklórico, an organization dedicated to exploring Mexican dance and music; and she served as a global service scholar at the UCI Blum Center for Poverty Alleviation.

Acevedo’s passion for service and research led to her recent Humanities Out There internship at UCI's Langson Library, where she created a virtual book display and learned more about the curation process, and to her position as program co-director at UCI’s Student Outreach and Retention Center. Upon graduation, Acevedo looks forward to pursuing a career as a public librarian and to supporting others in research endeavors of their own.

Trinity Hunt-McGuinness came to UCI to study biomedical engineering, but after taking a gender & sexuality studies course during her second year, her worldview “completely transformed" — and so did her major.

Soon after joining the gender & sexuality studies department, she added an African American studies minor, impressed by the “spirit of empathy and caring for others” cultivated by both departments’ faculty. Last summer, Hunt-McGuinness brought that empathetic spirit to her internship with the Black Panther Oakland Community School Project, where she worked to archive photos and collate histories about the collectively-run elementary school during its height in the 1970s. Inspired by the Black Panthers’ educational mantras — including “Each one teach one” and “The world is your classroom” — Hunt-McGuinness has since collaborated with the UCI history department to develop 10th-grade curriculum about the history of intersectional feminism in America.

Upon graduation, Hunt-McGuinness hopes to continue writing, teaching and transforming the lives of her own future students — just as her community of professors, mentors and peers transformed hers.

Growing up Black and Filipino, English major Jalen Jones rarely saw himself represented in popular culture — but he has spent the past four years working to change that.

In his Humanities Honors Program thesis, Jones explored the startling lack of “Blasian” coming-of-age novels and analyzed how their themes differ from other young adult narratives. As the editor of Politically Invisible Asians, a newsletter dedicated to “amplifying Gen Z Asian American voices,” Jones has highlighted the often-overlooked convergences between Black and Asian American communities. In his own fiction, nonfiction and poetry, the creative writing minor has sought to give voice to such intersections.

Though Jones says there is “no way [he] won’t be a writer in the future,” he has other aspirations, including working in the film industry (throughout college, Jones ushered talent around the Oscars Ceremony for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), teaching and earning an MFA in creative writing. The interdisciplinary nature of the English major taught Jones that he “doesn’t need to pin [himself] down to just one thing” after graduation. On the contrary, he says, “UCI Humanities has helped me realize how expansive my life can be.”

Ever since spending his teenage years designing video games with his friends and competing in coding “hackathons,” Ethan Song knew he wanted to study computer science at UCI. However, he also hoped to spend his college years exploring ethics, morality, logic and the humanistic underpinnings of life in general, so he decided to add a second major in philosophy. The seemingly divergent interests overlap “more than you’d think,” Song says — formal philosophical logic and reasoning is required in computer science classes, and cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and content moderation software are common topics for ethical debates. Upon graduation, Song looks forward to joining a tech company dedicated to “benefiting people and the environment” and to bringing an ethically-informed, humanistic framework to the world of computer science.

Micherlange Francois-Hemsley has always had a unique perspective on the world. She sees it as interdisciplinary and interconnected, and her goals and interests reflect that as well. She’s a dancer, a photographer, a sorority sister, an activist, a student and much more. Francois-Hemsley has spent the last three years thriving at UCI, majoring in African American studies and minoring in criminology, law and society. She has worn many hats in the UCI community: captain of UCI’s mock trial team, photography intern for the School of Humanities, vice president and treasurer of the historically Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, and student researcher for the Asian American and Pacific Islander VOICE project and UCI’s Oakland Community School Project, to name a few. After graduating this spring, Francois-Hemsley plans to fill a gap year with an internship before applying to law school. Learn more about her in this Q&A.

Whether she’s writing, acting, producing or directing for the stage or the screen, Kaehler is at home in the performing arts. As an undergraduate, she worked on 15 student films and over 18 theater productions. She recently finished directing her first full-length play and honors thesis, called “I and You." As part of her film and media studies courses, she created three films: a documentary about her family called “Sparkle in the Eye” and two narrative films, “Lapsed” and “Tombé.” Her writing tackles heavy topics: “Lapsed” is about a ghost who tries to save a young woman from committing suicide and “Tombé” is about sexual assault in the dance industry. She also created the films "How Long You Wander" and "Foresight" as well as the documentary "Earth Mother" for her digital filmmaking minor. Her film work earned her an Outstanding Production Student award this spring.

In addition, Kaehler was the host of “Office Hours” for two years, a radio show on KUCI where she interviewed UCI professors about their research. “I tried to spread it out all over campus, but I found, of course, that I was most drawn to interviewing people from the School of Humanities,” she says.

Despite entering UCI as a drama major, Kaehler was able to explore film and media studies courses through Humanities Core and soon found herself adding the major and taking a deeper interest in film. This summer, she’s going to be assistant directing “Comedy of Errors," a Shakespeare play in the New Swan Shakespeare Festival, and afterward, she hopes to continue to direct and write for film and theater. “All the stories that I’ve written center female characters,” she says. “That’s just something I really care about. I always try to cast diversely, but when I write, I like to write from my own experiences as a woman.”

Peter Hoc McEldowney’s thesis grew out of his personal Vietnamese American family history and explores how queer Vietnamese American artists utilize the powers of pop culture and subculture to fabricate identities, communities and imagined spaces of belonging. “I wanted to conduct research close to myself as a queer Vietnamese American,” he says. The scholar discovered his research topic after learning how artists approach visual production in D.I.Y ways, through zines, 'fake' auto-ethnographic film and pop music.

McEldowney originally entered UCI as a biological sciences student, but he found his true passion in art history and studio art. As part of the 4+1 B.A./M.A. program, an opportunity available to all UCI undergraduates regardless of major, he was able to stay an additional year to earn both a B.A. and M.A. in art history and work closely with a professor of his choosing. In 2021, he participated in the Honors in Art Undergraduate Thesis Exhibition 2021, where McEldowney presented his oil paintings – a thesis on teeth and dentistry as a metaphor for the Vietnamese American immigrant community’s relationship with care and salvation.

After graduation, he is eager to work in a museum, archive or non-profit and create more art. His advice to humanities undergraduates starting their own journeys at UCI? “Definitely take advantage of the paid internships provided by the art history department,” he says. “Even if you don't know if you're ready or qualified (you probably are), just send out applications as early as possible and get a feel for what kind of job you're into. And to incoming graduate students: You do not need to earn your breaks. Reclaim your time!”

When Bianca Vasquez entered UCI as an undergraduate Spanish major, she couldn’t have predicted that, five years later, she would be completing an art history master’s thesis on a little-known Hollywood preacher from the early 20th century. Her research has focused on the life and work of Aimee Semple McPherson – a Pentecostal evangelist born in Canada who moved to Southern California to lead her own church. Her Sunday night sermons turned into theater productions that used cardboard replicas of the radio, telescope, observatory dome, among other spectacles. She entertained audiences of thousands with how she merged technology, astronomy and Christianity – topics which have often been seen as being at odds with one another.

Vasquez hopes to continue her work on McPherson after graduation with the goal of getting it published, whether as a book or in a journal. “I feel like more people need to learn about her what she did,” she says. Afterward, she would like to work in a museum.

Vasquez’ research revolves around how art history engages with pop culture: She’s studied topics as broad as Disneyland, the videogame “Red Dead Redemption 2,” Frida Kahlo and Chinese war propaganda art. The scholar draws in her free time, so analyzing the visual world came naturally to her. She switched from Spanish to the 4+1 B.A./M.A. program in art history after taking Humanities Core coursework her first year at UCI: “We had to look at the humanities through the lens of art history, and that was something that I felt like I not only excel in, but that I really enjoy.”

As an undergraduate at Bard College majoring in Asian studies, Vanessa Baker got the opportunity to study abroad in Tokyo for two summers. But after living in the major international city, Baker wanted to learn more about the average person living in rural Japan. There, she encountered the environmental issues that impact the majority of the countrysides' citizens, and she set out to research their roots and the literature around them. After finishing a master’s in modern Japanese literature from Columbia University, Baker worked in rural areas of Japan for four years, in Mexico one year and Korea three years before coming to UCI to complete a Ph.D. in East Asian studies with a graduate feminist emphasis.

Her dissertation is on rural and proletarian texts in Japanese and Korean from the 1920s, 30s and 40s. She opens questions of power and culture in imperial Japan through the lenses of environmental humanities, gender studies and indigenous knowledges.

Her interdisciplinary education informed a lot of her work: “Something that I've really appreciated at UCI is that I was able to take courses outside of my department, and those ‘diversions’ actually made my project more interesting," she says. "I was taking courses in the history of Latin America, gender and sexuality studies, literary criticism, etc., and even though it seemed off-track, it actually helped me refine my arguments and really think about what I’m doing.” After Baker graduates, she has a post-doctoral appointment lined up in University of Pennsylvania's Korean studies department, and she hopes to turn her dissertation into a manuscript.