Previous Participants

Marisol Cuong - Department of Literature

Marisol Cuong is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Literature Department Spanish Section at the University of California, San Diego. She completed her B.A in Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley and earned her MA in Literature at UCSD. 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 UCSD, 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, California her upbringing defined her interests in immigration and violence against women. She is motivated to become the first in her family to graduate from a doctoral program. 

Matthew Ehrlich - Department of History

Matthew Ehrlich is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at UC San Diego. He attended California community college for four years before transferring to Hofstra University for his BA in History and Spanish. After working as a restaurant cook for several years in Vermont and New York, he attended Tufts University for an MA 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 UCSD 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.

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 MA in Literature from the University of California, San Diego and her BA 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 PhD 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 looks 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 is a Ph.D. candidate in the Literature Department at UC San Diego. She completed her BA in Spanish Literature and Latin American Studies at UCSD and earned an MA in Spanish at New Mexico State University. Before starting her PhD program, Jessica worked at a shelter for unaccompanied minors where she conducted family reunifications of migrant youth. Jessica worked with children as young as six 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.

Henry Argetsinger - Department of Philosophy

Henry Argetsinger is a Ph.D. candidate in the Philosophy Department at UC San Diego. His research focuses on moral responsibility and the ethics of blame. His dissertation and recent 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 BA from Beloit College, an MA from UW-Milwaukee, and has taught at the high-school and college level for over a decade. He is excited to explore teaching at the community college level and to continue to center issues of marginalization and power in his pedagogy.

Meaghan Baril - Department of Literature

Meaghan Baril is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Literature Department at UC San Diego. Before beginning her doctoral degree in 2017, Meaghan was an undergraduate at the University of Alabama where she received her B.A. 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 UCSD. In addition to her academic work, Meaghan has been a long-time teaching assistant for the Making of the Modern World program at UCSD 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 UCSD, 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 UCSD. As an IFI fellow, Meaghan 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.

Sean Compas - Department of Literature

Sean Compas is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Originally from Orange County and San Diego North County, Sean holds his B.A. in Political Science from UC San Diego, an A.M. in Cultural Studies from Dartmouth College, and a C.Phil. in Literature from UC San Diego. He is also an alum of the University of Virginia’s inaugural Semester at Sea voyage through the Institute for Shipboard Education. His academic interests are in disability theory, cultural studies, queer theory, critical gender studies, and media. Sean’s dissertation, “Surviving Dystopia: Desiring Disability and Deliberate Cripping in Apocalyptic Film,” explores the ways in which disability is recentered in dystopian films as a valuable and necessary embodiment for survival. More specifically, his work looks at how disability is reconfigured as a requirement for futurity/world building or the ways in which able-body/mind people must “crip up” their lives as a modality for survival or what he calls the Apocacrip. His dissertation asks how it is advantageous to theorize the body and human experience to desire disability in moments of catastrophe. Sean has previously taught in the Dimensions of Culture (DOC) and Culture, Art, and Technology (CAT) programs at UC San Diego. He has previously received funding from PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) and his work has been presented at The Futures of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth College (2018, 2022). As a Mellon PATH Fellow, Sean is elated to be working with and support students at the San Diego Community College District transfer to four-year institutions and to explore career paths teaching at SDCCD.

Rosie Dwyer - Department of Music

Rosie Dwyer is a Ph.D. candidate in Music with a concentration in Critical Gender Studies. She 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 wants to learn about diversity and inclusion efforts in campus arts programming. She also 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 is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at UC San Diego. She completed her BA in History at Brescia University in Owensboro, Kentucky before moving to California and obtaining her MA in History from Cal State Fullerton in 2015. Since arriving at UCSD, 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 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.

Maria Carreras - Department of History

Maria Carreras is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History. Her higher education career began in Long Beach, Ca, where she was born and raised, and received an BA and MA 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 will be a lecturer for the program in the summer teaching a course on 20^th 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. Recently, 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 Fellow, her aim is 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. 

Thomas Chan - Department of History

Kevan Antonio Aguilar - Department of History

Kevan Antonio Aguilar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History. His 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 recently 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).

Kevan Malone - Department of History

Kevan Malone is a PhD candidate in the Department of History. He began his higher education at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York, completed his BA at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and earned an MA in American studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. A member of the UCSD 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 Division 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 UCSD’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 twentieth century—has been funded by the American Historical Association, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Tinker Foundation, UCSD’s International Institute, the Institute of Arts and Humanities, and fellowships for the UCSD and UCLA special collections archives.

Beatriz Ramirez - Department of Literature

Beatriz Ramirez is a Ph.D Candidate in the Literature Department at UC San Diego. She was born in Mexico City and immigrated to Inglewood, CA at a young age. She received her Bachelor’s in English with a minor in Philosophy from Saint Martin’s University in Lacey, WA. Ramirez is currently completing her dissertation on Latin American, Mexican, and USMX 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 UCSD 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 the past five years. Lastly, she worked as a case manager and administrative assistant during the summers for the City of Los Angeles and SD County, assisting adults and at-risk youth with job placement and running reports for SD County’s Medical programs.