Lisa is a strange gal with a passion for all things trash. She is interested in race, waste, data, and how their relationships to one another shape the roles of non-‘human’ racialized subjects in social movements. She received her B.A from the CUNY Baccalaureate Program for Interdisciplinary Studies at Macaulay Honors College @ Brooklyn College, where she studied Urban Environmental Policy – the intersection between waste management, politics, and environmental justice. She received an M.A in Liberal Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center in Data Visualization. Her Master’s thesis was edited...
Gregoria is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies whose research draws from the fields of Latinx & Caribbean Studies, Queer Diaspora Studies, Queer of Color Critique, Performance Studies, and Afro-Caribbean Feminist Thought. Gregoria’s dissertation traces queer and erotic self-fashioning, performativity, and desire in occupied-Panamá to consider how queer temporality and counter-publics/geographies trouble the terms of occupation.
David is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies and a recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship. He holds an MA in Ethnic Studies (2019) from the department and an AB in Sociology (2017) from Vassar College.
His research interests include: Asian American literary and cultural studies; queer of color critique; gender and sexuality studies, women of color feminisms; visual culture; theories of racialized subjectivity.
Fernanda is a fifth year PhD candidate in the Ethnic Studies program. She received her undergraduate degree from Georgia State University, where she majored in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Journalism. Her undergraduate thesis used queer theory and queer of color critique to map temporal dissonances, abjection, and affects in experiences of immigration. Informed by her work on affect, queer theory, and temporality, Fernanda’s dissertation project explores loss and literary form in contemporary life writing by Latinx authors.
Aneliza Ruiz (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. student in the department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the recipient of the Graduate Division’s Chancellor Fellowship and former Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. She received her B.A. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Barnard College of Columbia University in 2019. Her research interests lie in Latinx aesthetics, popular culture, Women of Color Feminisms, and questions of belonging and home-making. Prior to her time at Berkeley, Aneliza had a short and occasionally illustrious career in...
Maria Victória Ribeiro Ruy (she/ella/ela), or Mavi, is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, where she is a recipient of the Berkeley Fellowship and the Magistretti Fellowship. Mavi comes from Curitiba, Brazil, the ancestral and unceded land of the Mbya Guarani and the Kaingang. She is the granddaughter of Chinese immigrants, and received her undergraduate and master degrees in History from Universidade Federal do Paraná. Her 2022 master thesis is titled Diaspora’s children: narratives from the second generation of Chinese immigration to Curitiba....
James Sun is an interdisciplinary historian, educator, and environmental activist whose interest in Asian American environmental justice and history stems from not only their own Chinese American identity growing up in Midwestern suburbia but also their strong desire to learn more about the world around them. Before starting their Ph.D., they served as a substitute teacher of computer science and algebra in Virginia, taught English on a year-long Fulbright Fellowship in South Korea, and worked at an environmental non-profit focused on cement and concrete decarbonization. During their...
Derek Wu is a PhD student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley (Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies). He is using historical, ethnographic, and action research methods to research how racial minorities use religion to support low-income urban neighborhoods in Oakland, CA, paying special attention to how these behaviors are shaped by secularization and decolonization narratives in the U.S. His research has been supported by the Asian American Research Center and the Asian Pacific Americans Religious Research Initiative and he has published writing on...
