Joshua is a PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies whose research interests are in Asian and Asian American studies, Disability Studies, History of Medicine, and Filipino American and Philippine studies, and Religious Studies. He is a recipient of the Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship and was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and California State University Sally Casanova Scholar. His dissertation, “State of Insanity: Mental Illness and Medical Knowledge in the Philippines under American Rule, 1898-1946," traces how the interplay between colonial bureaucrats, Filipino elite physicians, patients, and...
Maria Isabel Chi-Chable (she/her/leti’) is a Maya Yucateca scholar with familial roots in Peto, Yucatán. She is currently a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies, with a Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization, at the University of California, Berkeley. Maria graduated as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow from Wellesley College (2023) with a B.A in Women’s and Gender Studies and a concentration in representations, media, and race.Her current research broadly includes Indigenous language revitalization and Indigenous cultural...
Claire Chun is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies (with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies). She received her B.A. in Politics and Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University.
Her research explores how modern conceptualizations of “Korean” and “Asian” beauty, wellness, and aesthetics are shaped by overlapping forces of US militarism, tourism, and humanitarianism.
Claire’s research and writing has been published or is forthcoming in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Asian...
Irene Franco Rubio (she/her) is a scholar-activist, abolitionist, and organizer from Phoenix, Arizona. She is a first-generation doctoral student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, completing a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality and New Media. Irene’s intellectual and political commitments are rooted in her experiences as the daughter of Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants and as a community organizer shaped by Arizona’s SB 1070 and HB 2281 era, a period marked by heightened racialized policing, anti-immigrant repression, and the...
Isabella Garcia (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley where she is the recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship and the Katherine Sweeney Fellowship. Isabella received her B.A. in History and English & Creative Writing from Wellesley College in 2022 and was also a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow.
Isabella’s research aims to look at the roles Chicana and Chicane youth activists played in the broader Chicano Movement in the late twentieth century in the United States, and carefully consider why their...
Sarah (she/her) is a PhD student in Ethnic Studies and a recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship. Sarah was born and raised in the Bay Area and received her B.A. in English and American Studies from Scripps College. Her research is centered around Asian American literary and visual aesthetics- specifically art that was born out of the Third World Liberation, Asian American, Black Arts, and Women of Color Feminist Movements.
José Eduardo Valdivia Heredia (they/elle/ellx) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. They are a Chicanx artist and scholar from Sonoma, California. José received an M.A. in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley (2025) and a B.A. in Religion and Latin American/Latino Studies from Swarthmore College (2023)
At UC Berkeley, José’s research broadly examines cultural productions and performance in the Black Atlantic, centering on questions of health, history, and...
Dawny'all Heydari (she/her) is a transgender Iranian American scholar activist from the Los Angeles area. She is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dawny'all's research ties post-World War II U.S.-Israel-Palestine-Iran international relations to domestic developments in the U.S., including the rise of the white Christian nationalist movement, Iranian American and Palestinian American activism, and frontline-led Black and Latinx environmental justice movements around the ports and logistics sectors. Drawing...
Victoria (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and a recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship. Her dissertation centers on Southeast Asian refugee communities and their fight against California’s prison to deportation pipeline. She volunteers with the Asian Prisoner Support Committee and helps teach ROOTS, an Ethnic Studies course in San Quentin State Prison.
Beyond her U.S.-based work, Victoria is also interested in Vietnamese anti-colonial history, literary translation, and spiritual practice. She previously received a B.A. in Ethnic Studies at Brown...
Pilar Jefferson is a PhD student in the department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Pilar graduated from Vassar College in 2015 with a BA in Art History and Native American Studies focused on 20th century Native American art and cultural resilience. She is an experienced museum educator and has worked as a program coordinator and teaching artist at institutions including the Museum of the City of New York and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Pilar’s pursuit of a PhD comes out of a desire to understand and support better representation of Indigenous people in museums...
