Gregoria's research focuses on trans/queer of color and Latine & Caribbean archives, aesthetics, performance, activism, and digital media. Drawing from a range of archives, Goya's doctoral project, "Degenerates: Queer Performance in Panamá's Archives," attends to non-normative and queer Panamanian performativity and publics during and post U.S. occupation, including two contemporary trans/cuir collectives formed in Panama City. Gregoria was the recipient of the Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies Program Predoctoral Fellowship...
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.
Alex Rocha-Álvarez was born to Mexican farmworkers who raised her between the strawberry fields of Watsonville, California. As a resident of Jardines del Valle, a farmworker community also known as Murphy’s Camp, Alex grew up witnessing firsthand the hardships and resilience experienced by those who feed us all.
Miles from the nearest shopping center, out of reach of public transportation, and separated from other residential neighborhoods, growing up in the camp often felt like swimming in a fishbowl. But there was one external force that cracked Alex’s...
Aneliza Ruiz (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. Candidate in the department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation project, tentatively titled Vas a Ver: Mexican American Women and the Politics of Style in Los Angeles, examines the aesthetic and political links between the Pachuca, Chola, Chicana Activist, and Chingona figures. 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...
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...
Victor Xie (he/him) is a PhD student in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and a recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship. He was born and raised in the Bay Area and received his B.A. in English and Asian American Studies at UCLA. His research is centered around how Chinese diasporic subjects in the US have used and abused discourses of American freedom to gain legibility from the state, and how this entanglement has consequences for other racialized bodies living within and outside of US empire. He is particularly interested in political asylum, Cold War afterlives, and labor histories....
