Graduate Students

Current GFE Students 

Home Department: Latin American and Iberian Cultures

Fernanda Hernández Paredes is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at UC Irvine. Her research focuses on Latin American lesbian lives, cultures, and existences through the study of narrative works. In her dissertation, she explores depictions of lesbian childhood in both film and literature. A narrator herself, she has published fiction and nonfiction in Mexican anthologies.

Research Interests: Latin America, queer theory, lesbian lives, childhood studies, affect theory

Chasia Elzina Jeffries

Home Department: Culture and Theory Program

Amy Lantrip

Home Department: East Asian Studies

Lantrip studies early modern and modern Chinese literature in the Department of East Asian Studies. Her research interests include early Chinese science/speculative fiction, particularly the presentation of gender equality and women's rights, and satire. She is especially interested in fiction that appears in early women's journals and its impact on Chinese feminism.

Asha Rieussec

Home Department: East Asian Studies

Sarah Rodriguez

Home Department: Nursing Science

 

 

Will Saladin

Home Department: Comparative Literature

Camila Sanhueza

Home Department:  History

Kathryn Schubert

Home Department: Department of English
Kathryn's research focuses on the ethical and political possibilities presented by the manipulable body in Shakespeare’s plays. She is interested in the ways in which Shakespeare’s characters—particularly those whose bodies are marked by a vulnerability linked to gender—demonstrate new ways of relating to others that have profound political implications.

Research Interests: Early modern literature, Shakespeare, political theory, feminist theory, vulnerability and embodiment, ethics 

Martha Tesfalidet

Home Department: English

Research Interests: African and African diasporic literatures; comparative African and African American literary studies; modernity and postcolonial/decolonial studies; Black feminist theory and feminist literary methodologies; feminist world-making

 

Anna Wainwright

Home Department: Sociology

 

Sophie Wheeler

Home Department: East Asian Studies

 

 

 

 

Previous GFE Students

Pedro Acuna

Research Interests: Early twentieth-century Latin America; masculinity, sexuality and eugenic discourses in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay; sports and physical culture in the Southern Cone; performativity, repertoires, representation, and embodiment.

Zahra Ahmed

Political Science, Spring 2010

Research Interests: Political psychology, specifically service learning and its implications for citizenship and democracy

Dissertation Title: "Service Learning in Policy and Practice: a Study of Service Learning across Three Universities."

Akhila Ananth

Research Interests: Juvenile dependency law and the foster care system, cultural constructions of family and children, court architecture and aesthetics, feminist ethnography, and critical legal geographies

Elaine Kathryn Andres

Home Department: Culture & Theory

Research Interests: feminist cultural studies, music and place, popular cultures of U.S. empire, performance studies, Asian American and Filipinx studies

 

Jeremiah Axelrod

History, Winter 2001

Dissertation Title: "Toward Autopia: Envisioning the Modern Metropolis in Jazz Age Southern California"

Vanessa Baker

 

Robert Theodore Barrett

Robert’s research and teaching interests are North American Literature, Film, and Visual & Performing Arts, with a focus on gender, sexuality, race, and class. His dissertation examines literature, performance, art and activism in San Francisco, responding to the early part of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and how we remember, and memorialize, artists and activists of the period. The larger question he is exploring in this project deals with cultural transmission; how do those elided or erased from history transmit culture into the future, and how is that history received and re-transmitted? As such, Robert’s dissertation examines affective affinities with historical figures, how their iconic legacies are transmitted, and mythmaking and fabulation as modes of resistance to erasure.

Tamara Beauchamp

Research Interests: Modernism, decadence, psychoanalysis, race and gender theory

Mariam Beevi

Comparative Literature, Spring 2006

Dissertation Title: "Surfin' Vietnam: Trauma, Historical Memory, and Cultural Politics in Twentieth Century Literature and Film."

Joe Bergeron

Political Science, Summer 2008

Research Interests: American politics, gay and lesbian politics, identity politics

Dissertation Title: "Social Movement Promotion of Public Policy During Challenging Times."

Joanna Bouldin

Visual Studies, Spring 2004

Dissertation Title: "The Animation and The Actual; Toward a Theory of Animation, Live-Action, and Everyday life."

Kimberly Bowen

Degrees:
English, Spring 2001

M.A. English, Spring 2001

Yvonne Braun

Social Science, Spring 2005

Dissertation Title: "Feminist Political Ecology in Practice: The Social Impacts of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project."

Dan/Dani Bustillo

Home Department: Visual Studies
 

Research Interests: queer and trans of color theory, queer latinx studies, feminist security studies, surveillance studies, media of resistance

Lionel Cantu

Social Science, Summer 1999

Dissertation Title: "Border Crossing: Mexican Men andthe Sexuality of Migration."

Simona Capisani

 

Chuan Chen

Comparative Literature, Summer 2009

Research Interests: Transpacific postcoloniality, queer feminist studies, philosophy of Enlightenment, experimental and narrative fiction and cinema

Dissertation Title: "Luminous Screens: Between Figure and Time in the Cinematic Image."

Ssu-yu (Jill) Chen

Research Interests: Gender Governance, Kinship, Critical Race Theory, Theory of Nationalism and Nation-Building, Postcolonialism in East Asia

 

Cindy I-Fen Cheng

History, Spring 2004

Dissertation Title: "Contesting Chinese/American Identities in the Age of Cold War Politics."

Erica Maria Cheung

Home Department: Culture & Theory

My dissertation examines the role that food plays in the racialization and gendering of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of popular culture texts, I illustrate how an American appetite for Asian taste, or what I theorize as "umami," is indicative of larger processes of U.S. imperialism, racial capitalism, and the gendered production of labor.

Research Interests: Cultural studies, critical race theory, food studies, media studies

Kylie Ching

Home Department: Visual Studies

Research Interests: Asian American visual culture and art history, contemporary American art history, feminist and queer theory, cultural memory, alternative press, and artist collectives

Monica W Cho

Home Department: East Asian Studies

Monica is a doctoral candidate at the department of East Asian Studies. Monica's research interrogates the trend in post-Korean War literature that employs madness of individuals in order to reflect on larger social concerns such as historical vestiges, state brutality, collective emotional distress, and power disproportion in the context of South Korea.

Research Interests: modern Korean literature, ecocriticism, gender and sexuality studies, affect theory

Valeria Chow

MA English, Spring 1998

Julie Cohen

History, Summer 2009

Dissertation Title: "Pedagogies for 'Productive Citizenship': The Cultural Politics of Child Welfare in Early Twentieth-Century Southern California."

Kelly Corwin

Research Interests: 17th Century British Drama and Politics

Margaux Cowden

Comparative Literature, Fall 2009

Dissertation Title: "Late Modernism & the Landscape of Perversity:Minor Utopianism 1930-1950."

Charlie Curtis

 

Marnie Dobson

Social Science, Fall 2005

Dissertation Title: "Professionalizing Touch: Gender, Sexuality, the Law and Massage Work."

Rose Emily DuCharme

 

Lan Phuong Duong

Comparative Literature, Spring 2005

Dissertation Title: "Vietnam and the Diaspora: Gender, Nation and the Politics of Collaboration."

Sharareh Frouzesh

PhD in Comparative Literature, 2013

Research Interests: Modern Iranian literatures and cultural productions; transnational literatures and feminisms; political and legal theory; postcolonial literatures and theory; psychoanalysis and phenomenology; dialectics of resistance and modernisms.

Karen Gallagher

German, Fall 2007

Dissertation Title: "Marie Herzfeld (1855-1940) and European Modernism."

 

Heather Goldsworthy

Social Ecology, Spring 2010

Research Interests: Women and environment, human security, environmental degradation and social change

Dissertation Title: "Compassionate Capitalism: Institutionalization and Legitimacy in Microfinance."

Isabel Felix Gonzales

 

Racquel Gonzales

Research Interests: histories of technology, surveillance studies, body politics and policing, game studies and culture, consumer culture and domesticity

Jordan Grasso (they/them)

Home Department: Criminology, Law and Society

Research Interests: I explore how safety is conceptualized and practiced in lesbian and queer bars and events in Southern California. In particular, I am interested in how communities that historically (and contemporarily) have not been able to rely on the police construct their own prefigurative systems of safety in an effort to rethink the role of law enforcement specifically, and the state more broadly. I also study topics related to police violence, police legitimacy, queer criminology, and queer spacemaking through a new abolitionist lens.

Naomi Greysor

Dissertation Title: "Sentimental Subjects: Politics of Belonging and the Radical Rhetoric of Modern U.S. Social Reform."

Jane Griffin

Comparative Literature, Summer 2009

Research Interests: Post-dictatorship women's literature of Latin America's Southern Cone region and Spain, in particular the relationship between women's writings, women's political activism, and state transformations from dictatorships to democracies

Dissertation Title: "The labor of Literature: Gender and Literary Culture in Chile from Dictatorship to Democracy."

Michelle Grisat

Philosophy, Summer 2001

Dissertation Title: "On Feminist Agency, Identity, Subjectivity: A Critique of Judith Butler's Radical Democracy in a Performative Mode."

Tara Hardinge

Sociology, Summer 2009

Research Interests: Gender, family, media and sexuality

Dissertation Title: "Benefits to Health in Marriage and Cohabitation: A State Level Analysis"

Tamara Harvey

English, Spring 1998

Dissertation Title: "Modesty's Charge: The Body and Feminist Tactics in Early American Women's Discouse."

Toni Hays (she/her/hers)

Home Department: English

In my research, I examine the confluence of American Imperialism in Asia and its effect on housing and familial formations in Asian/American literature and culture. By centralizing the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 in my research, I analyze how U.S. Cold War strategies in Asia extend earlier modes of de-formalizing imperial governance through the extension of liberal democracy and globalizing capital. These research interests also frame my commitments to pedagogical strategies that de-formalize the classroom and account for the reciprocal ways students and instructors work together to create learning environments.

Research Interests: 20th - 21st Century American Literature, post-1965 Asian American and Anglophone Literature and Culture, Global Asias, History and Theory of Home Renovation, literature and culture of the suburb

Carol Hayes

English, Summer 2000

Dissertation Title: "Mapping City Comedy: Topographies of London and the Anomalous Woman, 1599-1625."

Emma Heaney

Ph.D. in Comparative Literature

Research Interests: Anglophone and French Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, Feminist Studies

Dissertation Title: "The New Woman: Literary Modernism and the Trans Feminine Allegory."

Susan Hecht

History, Spring 2000

Dissertation Title: "Technology, Representation and the German Nation, 1900-1929."

Kathryn Henne

Ph.D.: Summer 2011, Criminology, Law and Society

Research Interests: anti-doping discourses, deviance, legal anthropology, physical cultural studies

Dissertation Title: "Imagined Playing Fields and Suspect Bodies: The Legalization and Medical History of Anti-Doping Regulation."

Jane Willy Hseu

English, Summer 2007

Dissertation Title: "Racialized English(es):On Asian/American and Latino/a Discourses of Language."

Linh Hua

English, Summer 2009

Dissertation Title: "Reading Love: Race amd the Political Economy of Affect."

Erin Huang

Comparative Literature, Summer 2012

Research Interests: Chinese cinemas and modern Chinese literatures, feminist film theory, sexuality and space, representations of city-body, subjectivity, urban theory, globalization, postmodern geography

Dissertation Title: Capital's Abjects: Chinese Cinemas, Urban Horror, and the Limits of Visibility.

Jason Huber

Research Interests: Contemporary art and media, gender and sexuality, feminist theory, ethics, relationality, affect and subjectivity, queer theory, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, taste and class, exhibitionary practices and reception, phenomenology and embodiment.

Cortney L. Hughes

Anthropology, Summer 2010

Dissertation Title: "Building Modern Morocco One Woman at a Time: Development, Islam, and Reproductive Practices."

Angelica Huizar

Spanish, Spring 2003

Dissertation Title: "The Performativity of Latin American Poetry"

Donavion Huskey

 

 Kim Icreverzi

Research Interests: Japanese body genre cinema, erotics, affect and the politics of
spectatorship

Wiebke Ipsen

History, Fall 2005

Dissertation Title: "Delicate Citizenship - Gender and Nationbuilding in Brazil, 1865-1891."

Lilly Irani

PhD in ICS, Spring 2013

Research Interests: Postcolonial studies of design and globalization; New media and labor politics

Alexander Jabbari

Research Interests: Persianate literary historiography of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Persian and Urdu); nationalism, modernity, sexual aesthetics

Kyle Julien

History, Fall 2000

Dissertation Title: "Sounding the City: Jazz, African American Nightlife, and the Articulation of Race in 1940s Los Angeles."

Martha Kadue

Dissertation Title: "We are not an Immigrant Nation": race, Sexuality and Citizenship in the New Germany"

Yuka Kanno

Visual Studies, Spring 2010

Research Interests: Feminist film theory, queer studies, queer film criticism, theories of representation, visuality, and embodiment; queer/lesbian visual subjectivity in Japanese visual culture

Dissertation Title: "Queer Female Networks in Japan Visual Culture."

Karen Kendrick

Social Science, Fall 2004

Dissertation Title: "Health, Beauty and Femininity: An Institutional Ethnography of Cancer Services for Women."

Jennifer Kihnley

Criminology, Law and Society, Summer 1999

 

Dissertation Title: "Courting Contradiction: Gender, Law and the Women's Collegiate Basketball."

Laura Knighten

English, Fall 2009

Dissertation Title: "Ireland's Citizen-Children and the Politics of Family Dysfunction."

Ben Kruger-Robbins

 

Patricia Levin

Visual Studies, Spring 2001

Dissertation Title: "About Turns: Minimalism to Excess in the Films of Yvonne Rainer."

Stefanie Lira

 

 

Jennifer Locke

English, Spring 2010

Dissertation Title: "Novel Possibilities: Constructing Women's Futures through Fiction, 1697-1799."

Katherine Mack

Comparative Literature, Spring 2008

Research Interests: Rhetoric and composition, theories of publics and public spheres, truth commissions and other transitional justice mechanisms.

Dissertation Title: "A Generative Failure: The Public Hearings of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission."

Kurt MacMillan

PhD in History, Winter 2013

Research Interests: Modern European and Latin American intellectual histories, science and embodiment, post-structural critiques of historical practice; the history of constitutional medicine and its relationship to racial discourse in Latin America

Jennifer Maldonado

MA East Asian Languages and Literatures, Winter 2006

Heather Martel

History, Winter 2001

Dissertation Title: "Contact: Christianizing the Soul, Disembodying Science, Americanizing the Flesh, 1498-1627."

Megan McCabe

Research Interests: transnational and transracial adoption, critical theory, and cultural criticism.

Connie McGuire

PhD in Anthropology

Dissertation Title: "Transnationalizing Gangs in the Americas: Advocacy, Expertise and Policymaking."

McKenna Middleton

Home Department: Spanish and Portuguese

Research Interests: 20th century Spanish literature, gender and sexuality studies, dictatorship and exile, memory studies, motherhood studies, feminist epistemologies.

Amanda Mixon

Mixon's research and teaching interests include 20th-century U.S. literature and film, gender and sexuality studies, and comparative race studies, with specializations in literatures and media of U.S. social movements, multi-ethnic cultural productions about the U.S. south, and the intellectual and institutional history of queer theory. Their dissertation, Queerer, My God, to Thee: Twentieth-Century White Southern Lesbian Writers & Anti-Racist Praxis, frames Lillian Smith (1897-1966), Rita Mae Brown (1944-), Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946-), Mab Segrest (1949-), and Dorothy Allison (1949-) as a distinct political tradition whose concern with how people are trained to inhabit and (re)produce whiteness radically departs from anti-racist political thought and activism among white southern women of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project is currently supported by a 2019-2020 American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship and received archival research funding from Duke University, the University of Virginia, and UCI Humanities Commons.

Anne Mocarski

Degrees:
MA German, Winter 1996

MA German, Winter 1996

Tarek Mohamed

 

Erin Moran

Research Interests: Migration, citizenship, gender, and sexuality; focus on relationship between immigration policy and refugee women's subjectivity in Ireland, particularly the impact of the 27th Amendment to the Constitution of Ireland

Chrisy Moutsatsos

Social Science, Fall 2001

Dissertation Title: "Transnational Beauty Culture and Local Bodies: An Ethnographic Account of Consumption and Identity in Urban Greece."

Heather Murray

Visual Studies, Winter 2008

Dissertation Title: "Monstrous Play in Negative Spaces: The Cultural Production of Biometric Bodies."

Janet Neary

English, Spring 2009

Research Interests: African American literature and visual culture (particularly 19th-century), cultural studies, feminist theory

Dissertation Title: "Fugitive Testimony: Race, Representation, and the Slave Narrative Form."

Jamie Needleman

MA SOCIAL SCIENCE, Spring 1999

Sara Newsome

Home Department: East Asian Studies

 

 

Natalie Newton

PhD in Anthropology, Fall 2012

Research Interests: Gender and sexuality, Vietnam, Vietnamese diaspora, transnational and post-colonial feminism, butch-femme, post-socialist societies, queer urban studies, queer theory

Mutsumi Ogaki

Home Department: Social Ecology Core Program

Research Interests: Gender bias in legal decision-making; gender and social movements; Japanese feminist activism; online activism; hashtag; virtual world

 

Stella Oh

English, Spring 2004

Dissertation Title: "Life Writing and Nation Formation: Contesting Legal and Visual Authority."

Randy Ontiveros

English, Spring 2006

Research Interests: Chicana/Chicano Studies; feminist theory; literary and cultural studies

Dissertation Title: "Culture, Ethnicity, Memory: the Making of the Chicano Movement."

Cynthia Maria Ovando-Knutson

Spanish, Spring 2008

Dissertation Title: "In Search of a Narrative of HIstory: Embodied Pain and Transformative Allegories in Four Latin American Novels of Dictatorship."

Seo Young Park

Ph.D.: Anthropology, Summer 2011

Dissertation Title: "Pace and Passion in Seoul's Dongdaemun Market, South Korea: Time in the 24-Hour City."

Amy Parsons

English, Spring 2007

Dissertation Title: "'And a Hundred Other Shadowy Things': Specters of the Transnational in Nineteenth-Century American Literature."

Justin Perez

Research Interests: queer studies, human and sexuality rights, identity, Latin America

Susan Pinette

French, Fall 1999

Dissertation Title: "Alternative Ethnographies: Genre and Cultural Encounter in Early Modern French Texts."

Teresa Pond

Degrees:
MFA Drama, Spring 2003

MFA Drama, Spring 2003

Dissertation Title: MFA Thesis Tltle: "A Working Girl's Guide to Bringing Feminist Theater to the Masses."

Vivian Price

Political Science, Summer 2000

Dissertation Title: "Hammering It Out: Community Pressure and Affirmative Action in US Highway Constrcution Projects."

Jessica Pruett

Research Interests: Jessica’s research interests include queer theory, new media, affect theory, crip theory, trauma studies, lesbian fandom, gender and sexuality studies, and performance studies.

Anandi Rao

 

Elizabeth Rayfield

Visual Studies, Summer 2004

Dissertation Title: "Her Apparent Admiration and the Intensity of her Gaze: Race, Class and Gender and the Stereocopic Viewing Experience."

Carrie Reiling

Research Interests: International relations, NGOs, United Nations, feminist security studies, West Africa

James Renteria

Degrees:
M.A Culture&Theory, Spring 2010

M.A Culture&Theory, Spring 2010

Stephanie Reyes-Bell

History, Spring 2001

Dissertation Title: "Gendered and Racialized Constructions of Alcoholism in the Postwar Era."

Valentina Ricci

Ph.D. University of California, Irvine

Research Interests: German idealism, Political philosophy, Feminist philosophy, Ethics, Bioethics

Kimberly Richman

Criminology, Law and Society, Spring 2003

Dissertation Title: "Judicial Narratives in Custody Cases Involving Gay and Lesbian Parents, 1952-1999: A Study of Indeterminacy and Meaning Making in Legal Rationales and Outcomes."

Sarah Ross

MFA Studio Art

Dissertation Title: "The Shape of a Neighbor(hood)."

Paula Ross

MFA Studio Art

Dissertation Title: "(Not) In Any Order."

Bianca Rubalcava

 

Tracy Sachtjen

History, Fall 2009

Research Interests: Queer theory, feminist theory, nineteenth century cultural history

Dissertation Title: "American Ugly: Appearance and Aesthetics in Cultures of U.S. Nationalism, 1848-1915."

Melissa Sanchez

English, Summer 2002

Dissertation Title: "Monstrous Eros: A Reconsideration of Seventeenth- Century British Romance."

Lisa Sanchez

Criminology, Law and Society, Spring, 1998

Dissertation Title: "Sex, Violence, Citizenship, and Community: An Ethnography and Legal Geography of Commercial Sex in One American City."

Nichole Sanders

History, Summer 2003

Dissertation Title: "Gender, Welfare and the 'Mexican Miracle': The Politics of Modernization in Post Revolutionary Mexico, 1937-1958."

Anat Schwartz

Home Department: East Asian Studies

Anat is a doctoral candidate in East Asian Studies. Anat's research takes an interdisciplinary approach to contemporary South Korean feminist activism and communities, paying particular attention to the intersections of feminist spaces on and off social media.

Research Interests: gender and sexuality studies, contemporary South Korean society and culture, feminist epistemology, and cultural theory.

Jacqueline Scoones

English, Summer 2000

Dissertation Title: "Dwelling Poetically: Environmental Ethics in Contemporary Fiction."

Priya Shah

English, Fall 2008

Dissertation Title: "Consuming Empire: Desire in Colonial Britain and India, 1789-1872."

Jianmin Shao

Home Department: Psychological Science

Research Interests: feminist psychology, queer anthropology, adolescent development, parent-child relations, China and globalization

Elisabeth Sherratt

MA Visual Studies, Spring 2000

Jennifer Thompson

Comparative Literature, Spring 2000

Dissertation Title: "Realizing Rape."

Donna Tong

English, Spring 2009

Research Interests: Asian American literature, multi-ethnic literatures of the U.S., Caribbean literature

Dissertation Title: "English lessons: Racial Hegemony and Linguistic Hierarcies in Selected Asian American Texts."

Emily Troshynski

Ph.D.: Summer 2011, CRIM, LAW & SOCIETY

Dissertation Title: "Surveillance Technology and teh Transformation of Criminal Justice: Monitoring Sex Offenders with GPS Technology."

Charlene Tung

Social Ecology, Spring 1999

Dissertation Title: "The Social Reproductive Labor of Filipina Transmigration Workers in Southern California: Caring for Those Who Provide Elderly Care."

Pilar Valero-Costa

Spanish, Spring 2002

Dissertation Title: "La Mistica Sufi En Maria Zambrano."

Neha Vora

Anthropology, Summer 2008

Dissertation Title: "Participatory Exclusion: the Emirati State, Forms of Belonging, and Dubai's Indian Middle Class."

Elane Westfaul

Home Department: Political Science

Ingrid Wilkerson

History, Fall 2009

Dissertation Title: "Strangers in Good Company: Immigrants in Elizabethan London."

Victoria Wilson

PhD in Political Science Spring 2013

Research Interests: Feminist theory, minority politics, race/ethnicity, particularly why race liberation orientated social movements both react to and reinscribe essentialized ideologies of gender

Alex Wolff

Alex Wolff is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). They received their M.A. in Anthropology from UCI, and their B.A. in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Their research examines intersections among economic insecurity, temporality,  and sexuality, through a focus on the political activism  of LGBTQ+ young adults in South Korea.

Research Interests: issues of political participation, governance, citizenship, gender, and sexuality in South Korea. 

Kassia Wosick-Correa

Sociology, Fall 2007

Research Interests: Sexuality, gender, intimate relationships, nonmonogamies, inequality, race/ethnicity

Dissertation Title: "The New Fidelity: How Monogamous and Explicitly Nonmonogamous Relationships Negotiate Love, Commitment, and Sexual Intimacy."

Chiou Ling Yeh

History, Spring 2001

Dissertation Title: "Taking it to the Streets: Representations of Ethnicity and Gender in San Francisco's Chinese New Year Festivals, 1953-2001."

Nima Yolmo