Integrated Fellowship participants

Bahar Abdi

Department of Literature

Bahar Abdi (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in literature at the University of California San Diego, with a specialization in Critical Gender Studies. She received her B.A. in Persian Literature from the University of Tehran and her M.Litt. in Middle Eastern Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of St. Andrews.

Her research focuses on performance, socially engaged art, and everyday forms of resistance in Iran. She is especially interested in how performance can preserve suppressed histories and help communities imagine a different future. Her dissertation examines how people remember histories of violence when official archives are incomplete or controlled by the state. Thinking from “the South” as both a marginalized geography and a critical perspective, she explores how erased histories endure through bodies, sound, ritual, ruins, water, wind, and other more-than-human forms of memory.

At UC San Diego, Bahar has taught in the Department of Literature and the Dimensions of Culture writing program. She also has several years of experience teaching Persian literature at high schools in Iran. As an immigrant and multilingual student and educator, her teaching is shaped by her own experience of moving across languages and educational systems. She particularly enjoys helping students develop confidence in their voices and value their own experiences as meaningful sources of knowledge. Across both her research and teaching, Bahar sees the humanities as a space for examining power and imagining more just futures.

Phuong Vuong

Department of Literature

Phuong Vuong is a Ph.D. candidate in literature with a specialization in critical gender studies at UC San Diego. She researches Asian American feminist and queer texts’ approaches to history, refusal, and relations to land and water. She is interested in how Asian American artists and writers navigate visibility, opacity, and de/colonization in the context of relational racialization and settler colonialism.

Before coming to UC San Diego, Phuong worked in community organizing and secondary education. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Colorado - Boulder, where she studied poetry, and a bachelor’s degree in Black Studies from Amherst College. She has taught as an instructor of record in UC San Diego's Department of Literature and CU Boulder's English Department, and she has worked as a teaching assistant in the Dimension of Cultures (DOC) writing program at UC San Diego.

As a first-generation college student herself, Phuong encourages students to take advantage of mentoring, cultural, and political opportunities to build community and develop critical perspectives. She hopes to further these goals through her writing as well, where she often examines language, migration, and diasporic relations.

Phuong is the author of two poetry collections, ”A Plucked Zither” (Red Hen Press, 2023), which won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award 2021, and “The House I Inherit” (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Her poetry and essays have been published in a range of literary journals, including American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Her academic writing can be found in the Journal of Asian American Studies.

Evelyn Vasquez

Department of Literature

As transfer student from Pasadena City College (PCC), at UC Davis, Evelyn Vasquez researched the garden design layout of East Los Angeles housing projects built post-WWII with the support of the Mentorship for Undergraduate Research in Agriculture, Letters and Science program (MURALS). After graduating from UC Davis, Vasquez worked at PCC’s Transfer Center supporting students with personal statements and filling out applications for FAFSA, EAOP, UCs, CSUs, and the Common App. Vasquez conducted workshops to cater STEM/MESA transfer applicants, then joined UC San Diego’s STARS program combining their field research of housing in LA (through W.O.R.K.S) to Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower.”

Vasquez’s career continued as Fulbright English Scholar in Mexico, and supporting local reading programs. As a PhD student, The Comics Studies Society honored Vasquez’s conference essay “Socializing the Tenement as Depicted in Comic Art” for the Hillary Chute Award. The Jewish Studies Fellowship supported their research to consult Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement Records at the New York Public Library and the Tenement Museum.

Currently, Evelyn Vasquez is examining how authors and visual artist use imagery to detail the living spaces to show the living spaces of diverse architectural and natural landscapes in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Vasquez is looking at immigrant, Native American, and Black literature, and how authors and artists represent bureaucratic architectural and geographical housing corruption. The first Federal Housing Act in the U.S. appeared as part of the New Deal, but earlier legislation such as the Tenement Acts, the Homestead Acts, and the Fugitive Slave Acts all had housing as a central component. As a scholar from Lincoln Heights and East LA, Vasquez sought to better understand the circumstances of my upbringing and those from other working-poor housing areas, saying “My background and research have shaped the questions I continue asking about housing development and residents’ experiences, as shown in the arts and social sciences.”

Throughout their career, Vasquez has presented research in different iterations that have led to awards including the Sawyer Seminar Fellowship, GPSA Interdisciplinary Research Award for innovative research in tenements, UC Humanities Consortium Graduate Society of Fellows Dissertation Award, the Oceanids Fellowship, Black Studies Travel Grant, and the American Association of University Women (AAUW) dissertation fellowship. “I am also an advocate for students with disabilities which led me to the OAR^2 GEPA intern position, where I created events for grad and professional students with disabilities,” they said. “I am excited to be a PATH fellow and be part of the community college students, faculty, and staff.”

Boris Acosta Jaramillo

Department of Music

Boris Acosta-Jaramillo is a pianist, composer, educator and researcher specializing in jazz improvisation, instrumental multivocality, performance, and music production. As a Ph.D. candidate in Music (Integrative Studies) at UC San Diego, his work investigates how sound serves as a reflection of cultural identities, histories and traditions.

Boris holds a bachelor’s degree from Berklee College of Music in Boston, and a master’s degree from Queens College in New York City. His academic journey is driven by a profound passion for exploring the intersections of music, culture, and identity — an interest that continues to shape both his research and creative endeavors.

With over 20 years of experience, Boris has performed internationally at prestigious festivals such as the Blue Note Jazz Festival and the Shanghai Jazz Festival. He has collaborated with renowned artists including Henry Threadgill, Mark Dresser and Terell Stafford. His interdisciplinary approach seamlessly integrates research, performance, composition, improvisation, music production, and community engagement, inspiring future generations through the transformative power of music.

Pablo Dodero Carrillo

Department of Music

Pablo Dodero Carrillo is a Ph.D. candidate in Music at UC San Diego. His research examines the history and historiography of electronic music in Mexico, focusing on how instrument design, language, and access intersect with the transnational circulation of music technologies and their adoption into localized practices. He is particularly interested in inclusive and experimental archival methods that expand how electronic music histories are written and remembered. His work has appeared in Emille: Journal of the Korean Electro-Acoustic Music Society, and he has presented at international conferences including Harvard University’s “Instruments, Interfaces, Infrastructures.” He has also collaborated on reissues of historically significant albums such as “Música Electroacústica Mexicana,” contributing to the preservation and renewed circulation of Latin American experimental sound practices.

As an educator, Pablo has taught courses and workshops on sound, technology, and music history at UC San Diego, the university’s Academic Connections, and A Reason to Survive (ARTS). Beyond the classroom, he has contributed to community-centered projects including “Blacktronika: No Manual” for Google Arts & Culture, “Music on the Move” with the Center for World Music, and the documentary series “Los Años Dorados.” His own experience as a community college student was deeply formative, and as a Mellon PATH fellow, he looks forward to supporting transfer and first-generation students while advancing inclusive, globally informed approaches to the study of electronic music.

Aimee Jurado

Department of Literature

Aimee Jurado is a Ph.D. candidate in UC San Diego's Department of Literature. She received her bacheleor's degree in English from California State University, Fullerton and a master's degree. from UC San Diego's Literature program. Her dissertation "Fermented Subjects: Asian American Subjectivity Contained and Transformed" examines Asian American memoir form, incarceration, parent-child relationships and U.S militarization as different structural and literary containers that inevitably shape Asian American being. Ultimately, her work studies what comes of Asian immigrant families when contained, under pressure, over a period of time, much like the fermentation of cultural foods like kimchi. As the daughter of Filipino immigrants and a first-generation student, Aimee’s research and pedagogy cannot help but attend to the immigrant family and the experiences of first-generation students and people. She has been able to foster her commitment to these communities while teaching for the Dimensions of Culture (DOC) writing program, the Literature department’s multiethnic American literature sequence, and as a mentor for the Graduate Application Mentorship Program (GradAMP). Her writing can be found in the "Body Matters" issue of Women's Studies Quarterly.

Caleb Mertz-Vega

Department of Literature

Caleb Mertz-Vega was born and raised in Pennsylvania but found his way out to San Diego with a spark for adventure and a desire to get out of the small town he is from. He earned his Associates for Transfer in English and Spanish mostly at San Diego City College then transferred to UC Berkeley where he earned his double bachelor’s degrees in English and Spanish. Caleb has even been featured on City College’s English website as a student spotlight. He is now a Ph.D. candidate in the Literature department at UC San Diego, studying LGBTQ+ literature from and about Venezuela and Colombia. Over the summer, he’s been working to better understand how absence and masculinity work with, against, and through each other in regional literatures. Recently, through the Speculative Environmental Futures Mellon grant, his research took him to Bogotá, Colombia and Mexico City, Mexico, both places he is excited to return to.

Caleb is an older wiser learner, since he spent the many years immediately after high school to pursue restaurant work. He is also a multi-passioned individual who has self-published three novels but has a long history of tinkering with cars, learning html, doing voice over, and trying to start his own business. Community college was an opportunity for him to learn more about the craft of writing and the power of words, simultaneously teaching him the power of focusing on something long term. Debatably inspired most by the professors he had in community college, he hopes to bring a similar inspiration to the PATH program. Additionally, he hopes to provide mentorship and guidance to those interested in transferring because as a first-generation college student he remembers feeling lost a lot of the time.

Joy Miller

Department of History

Joy Miller is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California San Diego, specializing in African American labor history and migration. Her dissertation, "Freedom and Sugar: African American Laborers and Hawaiian Sugar Plantations in the 20th Century," explores how race, labor, and empire shaped the experiences of African American workers in Hawai‘i’s sugar industry. She holds a master’s degree in History from California State University San Marcos, where her research focused on African American political cartoonists in the NAACP’s The Crisis, and a bachelor’s degree in History, where she served as president of the History Club.

Her work engages both scholarly and public audiences, with service on the San Diego Historical Resources Board and presentations at national conferences, including the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. Miller is committed to advancing Ethnic Studies in higher education and currently teaches at multiple Southern California community colleges, where her pedagogy emphasizes racial justice, community engagement, and critical historical inquiry. She has also served as a teaching associate for UC San Diego’s History Department, Ethnic Studies, and the Making of the Modern World program.

Bianca Negrete Coba

Department of Literature

Bianca Negrete Coba is a mixed-race Chicana from west Chula Vista. She is currently a UC San Diego Ph.D. candidate in Literature and Cultural Studies with a Specialization in Critical Gender Studies set to graduate Spring 2026. She is the first in her family to attend a university, an achievement she attributes to her four years as an AVID student in high school (a college prep program for marginalized first-generation students). Bianca attended UC Merced, where she intended to major in Environmental Engineering but ended up getting a bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in writing because she found reading, writing and thinking about the environment more culturally impactful in the humanities. In the English and writing programs at UC Merced, Bianca developed her poetry and creative writing and wrote a senior thesis about ecocriticism focusing on Brando Skyhorse’s novel “The Madonnas of Echo Park” (2010). She stayed at UC Merced for her master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Humanities, where she focused on environmental philosophy, literature and sexuality, and posthumanism and cinematic ecology. Bianca is currently working on her dissertation tentatively titled “Chicanx Displacement Stories: From L.A.’s “Chavez Ravine” to S.D.’s Barrio Logan and South Bay,” teaching, volunteering in the community archive at the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center, and lovingly mothering her silly and tenacious toddler.

Marisol Cuong

Department of Literature

Marisol Cuong completed her bachelor's degree in Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley and earned her Ph.D. in Literature at UC San Diego. Before starting graduate studies, Marisol worked for a non-profit charter school that helps non-traditional minority students that were teenage mothers, formerly incarcerated, and/or undocumented. Through such experiences she embraces community knowledge through femtorships, teach-ins, and advocacy. At UC San Diego, Marisol has taught Spanish Literature and Language classes in both the literature and linguistics department. Additionally, she has held Associate-In positions teaching Critical Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies courses that center the issues of race, class, and gender geared toward Latine communities. Marisol’s dissertation "Witnessing: The Fragmented Reality of Militarization and Displacement of Latine Communities" examines where and how violence is created, condoned, and reproduced to juxtapose a domestic war and a legacy of imperialism through the militarization of communities of color. Marisol Cuong was born and raised in Los Angeles. Her upbringing defined her interests in immigration and violence against women. Motivated to become the first in her family to graduate from a doctoral program, she recieved her Ph.D. in 2024 and is currently a lecturer in the UC San Diego Department of Ethnic Studies.

Matthew Ehrlich

Department of History

Matthew Ehrlich attended California community college for four years before transferring to Hofstra University for his bachelor's degree in History and Spanish. After working as a restaurant cook for several years in Vermont and New York, he attended Tufts University for an master's degree in Global History. His dissertation focuses on nineteenth-century Spanish nationalism through the lens of race, slavery, and colonialism during the Cuban wars of independence from 1868-1898. He has worked as a teaching assistant for the Making of the Modern World program for several years, as well as a summer instructor for the History department. As a lifelong hard-of-hearing individual who has struggled with ADHD and other learning disabilities since childhood, his personal experiences as a student provide the basis for his advocacy for accessibility as an instructor. In addition, over a decade of continuing research into the legacies of inequality and intolerance make him a passionate critic of institutional oppression in all forms; commitments he pursues outside the classroom as a labor organizer, founding member of the Dollar Lunch Club, a UC San Diego mutual-aid initiative to address food insecurity, and Vice President of a living-history (“reenactment”) organization dedicated to combating white supremacy and gender- and sexuality-based discrimination within the field of interpretive public history. He is thrilled to return to his community college roots to work with new generations of students in building equitable, diverse, and inclusive classrooms and communities. He received his Ph.D. in 2025.

Andrea Zelaya

Department of Literature

Andrea Zelaya is a scholar, researcher, educator, writer, artist, translator, and cultural activist. A Central American immigrant, her cultural heritage and background inform her creative, academic, and social justice endeavors. She received her master's degree in Literature from the University of California San Diego and her bachelor's degrees in both English and Spanish Literature from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi with minors in Latin American Studies and History, as well as a TESOL certification. She has served as a pro bono translator for various non-profit organizations and immigrant communities in South Texas. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Literature at the University of California San Diego. Her research interests include 20th & 21st century Latin American literature, with a special emphasis on Central America. Her theoretical interests include decolonial feminisms and theories of fragments, temporalities, bodies, and social space. Her creative work and current research center around themes of fragmentation, trauma, and memory of postwar Central America. She has published fiction and poetry in both English and Spanish. Some of her cross-disciplinary interests include art, cultural studies, history, psychology, architecture, music, film, mental health, neurodivergence, disability studies, and linguistics. As a Mellon PATH IFI fellow and a community college graduate and transfer student herself, Andrea said she looked forward to contributing to, supporting, and learning from the students, faculty, and administrators at the San Diego Community College District.

Jessica Aguilar

Department of Literature

Jessica Aguilar completed her bachelor's degree in Spanish Literature and Latin American Studies at UC San Diego and earned an master's degree in Spanish at New Mexico State University. Before starting her Ph.D. program, Jessica worked at a shelter for unaccompanied minors where she conducted family reunifications of migrant youth. Jessica worked with children as young as 6 years old who sometimes only spoke indigenous languages, and young girls and boys who had experienced trauma during their journeys. As a case manager, Jessica saw how language and racial differences served as tools for systematic discrimination and barriers to access resources. She also witnessed the prejudice against Indigenous minors and children of African heritage who would continuously pronounce that they felt as if their voices didn’t matter. This experience prompted Jessica to go back to pursue a Ph.D. in literature. 
 
In addition, Jessica’s experiences as a first-generation, transfronteriza student from the San Ysidro – Tijuana borderlands, also informs her understandings of border relations, [im]migration, social mobility, language studies, and education access. Her current research interrogates how fictional narratives of Central American transmigration contribute to a production of migrant identity/ies. Her main question explores how literature and cultural productions challenge and assist the construction of “racializing assemblages” to fit the [im]migrantbody into categories of the human. She received her Ph.D. in 2024 and is currently the College Access Program Manager at Breakthrough San Juan Capistrano.

Henry Argetsinger

Department of Philosophy

Henry Argetsinger's research focuses on moral responsibility and the ethics of blame. His dissertation and publications are concerned with the gaps between our day-to-day practices of judging and holding one another responsible and the way in which philosophical theories of responsibility ground these judgments. He is particularly interested in the failures of traditional theories to account for systemic biases (of racism and sexism, for example) and dynamics of social power. Henry has a bachelor's degree from Beloit College, a master's degree from UW-Milwaukee, and has taught at the high-school and college level for over a decade. He said he is excited to explore teaching at the community college level and to continue to center issues of marginalization and power in his pedagogy. He received his Ph.D. in 2023 and is currently a management analyst in the Public Works department of the City of Chula Vista.

Meaghan Baril

Department of Literature

Before beginning her doctoral degree in 2017, Meaghan Baril was an undergraduate at the University of Alabama where she received her bachelor's degree in psychology and English. Her dissertation, titled “Together Through the End: Theorizing Community in Apocalypse Literature,” explores the intersections between religious, racial, and gender identities and those relationships to community formation. This project shows how different perspectives on apocalypse allow for alternative understandings of the formation and importance of community and the social justice opportunities that community is capable of and has been supported by Institute of Arts and Humanities at UC San Deigo. In addition to her academic work, Meaghan was a long-time teaching assistant for the Making of the Modern World program at UC San Diego where she has also served as the senior and administrative support TA. Meaghan has further experience as an educator and mentor teaching upper-division Literature courses at UC San Diego, volunteering for the Everyone-A-Reader Program, and mentoring through the Access Youth Academy. Her focus on building community through education is also reflected in her organization of several graduate student conferences at UC San Diego. As an IFI fellow, Meaghan said she looks forward to continuing learning how to create, facilitate, and participate in vibrant educational communities in San Diego that strive towards social justice, equity, and support. She received her Ph.D. in 2023 and is currently a faculty member at MiraCosta Community College.

Sean Compas

Rosie Dwyer

Department of Music

Rosie Dwyer researches how popular music cultures are implicated in the gendered and raced relationships of domination that characterize life under neoliberalism. In her dissertation project, tentatively titled “Work It: Popular Music, Neoliberal Crisis and the ‘Hype-Up Work Ethic,’” she explores race, gender and the work ethic in post-Great Recession popular music. Rosie is also a teacher, and she has taught subjects ranging from sound art to classic literature as a teaching assistant in the music department and the Humanities Program at Revelle College. In her teaching, Rosie uses equitable and evidence-based pedagogy, especially active learning activities, to engage her students and promote a non-hierarchical classroom culture. Outside of the classroom, Rosie is active in the San Diego chapter of the UC Academic Student Worker’s Union, where she serves as Head Steward. Rosie also makes experimental pop music, which she has performed at venues in San Diego and Tijuana. As an Integrated Fellow, Rosie said she wants to learn about diversity and inclusion efforts in campus arts programming. She also said she looks forward to guest lecturing on topics in popular music and gender, and to facilitating a reading and creative practice group.

Lauren Wood

Department of History

Lauren Wood completed her bachelor's degree in history at Brescia University in Owensboro, Kentucky before moving to California and obtaining her master's degree in history from Cal State Fullerton in 2015. Since arriving at UC San Diego, Lauren has taught a variety of courses as a Teaching Assistant and as an Associate-In, for both the Making of the Modern World writing program and for the History department. In 2018, she became a Summer Graduate Teaching fellow and worked alongside faculty to craft a history course that concentrated on using equitable pedagogical practices and has become a staple during the summer sessions for the last five years. She was awarded the Don Tuzin TA excellence award for the 2020-2021 academic year and recognized for her work in helping students transition into the online learning environment that was required as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Lauren’s research is heavily guided by feminist studies and an impulse to bring agency back to those who are generally overlooked or consigned to stereotypes in medieval history. In her dissertation, “From the Devil We Came: Reimagining Female Agency with the Monstrous Mélusine,” Lauren analyzes the particular ways in which two various houses in the High Middle Ages used the fictional character of Mélusine in a competitive form of social memory. By emphasizing monstrosity and gender as categories of analysis, her dissertation assesses the ways in which a highly religious and misogynistic society was able to justify its support of a sexualized, maternal demon as an ancestress.

As a community college transfer student herself, Lauren was the second in her family to go to college and the first to complete a graduate degree. In addition to her experiences as a student and teacher, she is also a parent, an added obstacle as a student but one that brings with it its own learning experiences and perspective. As a fellow of the Mellon Integrated Initiative, Lauren said she hopes to bring her understanding as a former community college student, transfer student, and graduate student together with a pedagogical philosophy that centers on equity and inclusion. She recieved her Ph.D. in 2023 and is currently an assistant professor at University of Wisconsin Stevens Point.

Maria Carreras

Department of History

Maria Carreras's higher education career began in Long Beach, Calif.,where she was born and raised, and received bachelor's and master's degrees in history from California State University, Long Beach. Carreras has TA’ed for the Making of the Modern World writing program, served as the program’s Academic Support TA, and was a summer lecturer for the program teaching a course on 20th century world history. She was awarded the Don Tuzin TA excellence award for 2019-2020. As a Summer Graduate Teaching fellow, Carreras taught a course on the history of childhood, emphasizing how ethnic and racial identities are forged and transmitted, how gender identity is constructed, and how social class is passed on from one generation to the next. Her dissertation “A Local Affair: ‘Civilizing’ Barcelona’s Children during the Franco Dictatorship, 1939-1975” looks at the way in which the people of Barcelona challenged the Spanish state’s efforts to unify and homogenize the nation by organizing and conceptualizing modernity at the local level. By using childhood as a category of analysis, it looks at way in which the urban sphere can be used as a space to establish new forms of governance, challenging the national political structure. Carreras published an article in the peer-reviewed journal The International Journal of the History of Sport. Lastly, given her interdisciplinary research focus, she has been able to include a series of theoretical and methodological approaches from disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to her teaching.

Carreras has a keen interest in helping students develop passion, pride, and confidence in their work. As a PATH fellow, her aim was to serve San Diego’s diverse community, particularly the city’s binational community, who face additional challenges on their path to academic success, by working directly with students to develop study habits in a collaborative environment by drawing connections between what they already know and their classwork. She received her Ph.D. in 2022, and is currently an instructor in the Southwestern Community College District.

Thomas Chan

Department of History

Thomas Chan completed his bachelor's degree in history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities before coming to UC San Diego in 2015. His dissertation “Public Sacrifices of the Living Dead: Creative Violence and the Pathologization of Drug Criminals in Twentieth-Century China” analyzes how 20th century Chinese governments used historical memory, international medical studies, and communal anger to dehumanize drug users and traffickers from 1906 to 1953. His research has been supported by national and international organizations and foundations such as the American Council of Learned Societies, the Esherick-Ye Family Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the China National Scholarship Council, the UC San Diego Chancellor’s Interdisciplinary Collaboratory, and the Institute of Arts and Humanities at UC San Diego. He contributed a project on the precarity of migrant workers in Taiwan films to the edited volume "Locating Taiwan Cinema in the Twenty-First Century" in 2020. He tought Chinese and East Asian history, with a critical focus on histories of science, violence and policing in the UC San Diego Department of History, and has taught in the Dimensions of Culture College Writing program at Thurgood Marshall College as a teaching assistant. He has also served as the History department’s Graduate Diversity Representative. He received his Ph.D. in 2023 and is currently an assistant professor at Indiana University Bloomington.

Youngoh Jung

Department of History

Youngoh Jung specializes in Asian American history with a focus on transpacific militarism during the Cold War. His dissertation, "Unsettling Militancy: Rethinking the Korean Diaspora in the Militarized Transpacific," examines the history of diasporic Korean militarism and alternative identity/community formations in the Korean diaspora beyond the realm of the U.S. Military Empire in the Asia-Pacific. Before starting his doctorate program at UC San Diego, Jung received his master's degree in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto where he specialized in the history of authoritarian militarization in South Korea. His work in Korean history has been published in the Trans-Humanities journal in 2014. Jung served as the teaching assistant for the Race and Oral History in San Diego course for the last three years, the course component of the larger Race and Oral History in San Diego project. This course focuses on fostering community knowledge and voices over extractive academic methodologies through empathetic forms of oral history as well as building relationships between institutions of higher education and local communities. Jung is an alumnus of San Diego Mesa College, transferring to UC San Diego in 2008, and have been involved with youth initiatives in the San Diego Korean American community. As an IFI fellow, he said he was interested in learning more about how SDCCD meets the needs of its diverse student body and how more resources could be provided to both guide potential transfer students and assist transfer students transition to a new setting. He recieved his Ph.D. in 2024, and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa.

Alexis Meza

Department of History

Alexis Meza is from the San Fernando Valley and received her bachelor’s degree in History and Latin American and Iberian Studies from UC Santa Barbara. Her dissertation research examines the politics of historical and collective memory of the Salvadoran diaspora. In her work she centers migrant and refugee oral history, memory, and epistemologies. As a graduate student, Alexis has worked with the state-wide organization the Unión Salvadoreña de Estudiantes Universitarios and UC San Deigo's Student-Worker Collective. Alexis has previously taught courses on Latina/o Studies, Immigration and Refugee Studies, and the U.S.-Mexico Border in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of San Diego. She has also taught in the Chicana/o Studies Department at San Diego City College as part of the Concurrent Enrollment College and Career Access Pathways program. As part of the IFI program, she said she hoped to support initiatives that cultivate equitable pedagogical practices and educational pathways that prioritize the needs of underserved student communities. In the San Diego community, she is active in transborder migrant and refugee justice and solidarity movements. he received her Ph.D. in 2024, and is currently an assistant professor of ethnic and women’s studies at Cal Poly Pomona.

Heather Paulson

Department of Literature

Heather Paulson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Literature at UC San Diego. Her research examines the ways that feminist communal communities help create healing spaces for working-class people of multiracial backgrounds during periods of environmental and economic crisis. Heather was the first in her family to attend college and is an alum of San Diego Miramar College and UC Berkeley, graduating with the highest honors in English and Gender and Women’s Studies. She taught various educational levels predominantly in low-income schools for nearly a decade while also earning a Master of Education degree at the University of Hawai’i Mānoa before returning to get her Ph.D. at UC San Diego. Both her experience as a first-generation college student and her research on labor, gender, and race continue to influence her pedagogical philosophy centering social justice and equity. She is currently an assistant professor of English at San Diego Miramar College.

Ivana Polić

Department of History

Ivana Polić is a Ph.D. graduate in Modern European History in the History Department at University of California San Diego, where she also worked as a Teaching Assistant for Eleanor Roosevelt’s well-regarded Making of the Modern World Program. Her research focuses on the history of childhood and youth. She explores the importance of these generations in large scale processes such as modern nation and state building. Her dissertation project, “The (Re)Making of Young Patriots: Children and Nation Building in Wartime Croatia (1990-1995),” looks at the centrality of children and childhood in 1990s Croatia, where nation building took place in the midst of an ethnic conflict unseen in Europe since the Second World War. This dissertation research has been supported by the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies Research Grant, Association for Women in Slavic Studies Graduate Research Award, UC’s Frontiers of Innovation Scholars Program fellowship, UC San Diego’s International Institute Research Grant, and Friends of the International Center Fellowship. She was born in Rijeka, Croatia, where she also received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in History and English, both teaching-oriented majors. After moving to San Diego in 2014, her capacity as an international student at UC San Diego as well as engagement with the (South) Eastern European immigrant community in wider San Diego area allowed her to gain some insights related to the concerns of students attending the city’s community colleges. While a fellow of the Mellon Integrated Initiative, she said she was interested in learning more about the educational needs of immigrant and refugee students within the wider student body of San Diego community colleges. She received her Ph.D. in 2023 and is currently an assistant teaching professor at Florida State University.

Kevan Antonio Aguilar

Department of History

Kevan Antonio Aguilar's dissertation “Revolutionary Encounters: Mexican Communities and Spanish Exiles, 1906-1959” examines the social and political solidarities forged between Mexico’s laboring classes and Spanish political refugees in the wake of the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. His research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Hays and the Social Science Research Council. He has contributed publications to the edited collections "Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW" (Pluto Press, 2017) and the "Oxford Encyclopedia of Mexican History and Culture" (OUP, 2019). He recieved his Ph.D. in 2021, and is currently a professor history at UC Irvine.

Kevan Malone

Department of History

Kevan Malone began his higher education at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York, completed his bachelor's degree at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and earned a master's degree in American studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. A member of the UC San Diego community since 2014, he has represented our campus at the University of California’s Graduate Research Advocacy Day at the State Capitol in Sacramento and has been inducted into the Bouchet Graduate Honor Society. He has TA’ed for the School of Arts and Humanities’ PATH Summer Academy for students transferring from San Diego’s community colleges and has served as the History department’s head teaching assistant. A recipient of UC San Diego’s Summer Graduate Teaching Scholars Fellowship in 2019, Kevan taught a course on the history of the United States in the 1960s. He is the review editor for the Journal of San Diego History and has published commentaries in the San Diego Union-Tribune. His dissertation research — examining urbanization and environmental diplomacy in the Tijuana-San Diego borderlands during the 20th century — has been funded by the American Historical Association, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Tinker Foundation, UC San Diego’s International Institute, the Institute of Arts and Humanities, and fellowships for the UC San Diego and UCLA special collections archives. He received his Ph.D. in 2023, and is currently a visiting history professor at the University of Miami.

Beatriz Ramirez

Department of Literature

Beatriz Ramirez was born in Mexico City and immigrated to Inglewood, Calif. at a young age. She received her bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in philosophy from Saint Martin’s University in Lacey, Wash. Ramirez's dissertation is on Latin American, Mexican and U.S.-Mexico border detective fiction. In her dissertation, she interrogates the function of the detectives’ respective cities in their quests to find justice against corrupt government officials and criminals. Ramirez has also been an active member of UC San Diego and the wider San Diego community as the Graduate Climate Intern for the Graduate Division, holding various executive roles with the Graduate Student Association, especially in relation to student affairs and diversity. She was also a teaching assistant and guest lecturer for Revelle College’s Humanities Writing Program for five years. Lastly, she worked as a case manager and administrative assistant during the summers for the City of Los Angeles and San Diego County, assisting adults and at-risk youth with job placement and running reports for San Diego County’s medical programs. She received her Ph.D. in 2021, and is currently the associate director of the UC San Diego Writing Hub.