Goya is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Their research and teaching focus on trans/queer of color and Latine & Caribbean aesthetic and digital archives, performance, and geographies. Their doctoral project, “Degenerating: Queer Performance in Panamá’s Archives,” is the first trans and queer studies project on Panamá and its diaspora. Drawing from a range of archival collections, “Degenerating” attends to the media representation of racialized transgressive sexualities and gender nonconformity under the hyper-normative settler regimes of Panamá and the U.S., from the 1920s through the present. Through this transhistorical, inter-archival approach, the dissertation animates enduring forms of sexual and gender sovereignty of "tropical degenerates."
Goya’s work will appear in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism and QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking in 2026.
They are the recipient of the Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies Program Predoctoral Fellowship (2023-2024) and the UC President's Pre-Professoriate Fellowship (2024-2025). They received their B.A. from UC Santa Cruz and their M.A. from The University of Chicago.
Latine & Caribbean Studies, Trans/Queer of Color Critique, Trans/Queer Diaspora Studies, Archival Studies, Performance Studies, Media Studies, Geography
