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 transnational entanglements between diaspora, media, and ecology.
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 Halabe (she/her/hers) is a PhD Candidate in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, where she studies the US Third World Left with a focus on on student activism, internationalism, and the influence of Third World Marxisms in the long Sixties. Her dissertation project bridges Arab American Studies and Asian American Studies to explore the formation and strategies of anti-imperialist organizations as they developed their praxis alongside national liberation struggles occurring throughout the Third World. This project aims to re-imagine what social movement archives can look like, and...
José Eduardo Valdivia Heredia (they/them) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. José previously 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).
Their dissertation project centers the life writing of several black women cultural producers (writers, artists, musicians, healers) from the mid-20th c. to the turn of the 21st century. Through diaries,...
Dawny'all Heydari (she/her) is a transgender Iranian American scholar activist from the Los Angeles area, ancestral homelands of the Tongva people. She is a third-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 Brown environmental justice movements...
Victoria Huynh (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and an interdisciplinary scholar of Southeast Asia's post-war diasporas, with specific interests in displacement, U.S. empire, war and memory, and abolition feminism. Her dissertation, an ethnography of Southeast Asian refugees in California's prison system, takes up the criminal refugee as an imperfect victim of history and a figure which challenges the state-sanctioned dichotomy between innocence and culpability, and between rescue and condemnation. Currently based in Oakland, California, Victoria...
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...
