Graduate Students
|
Ana holds a bachelor's degree in Literature from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Peru. Additionally, she obtained a master's degree in Hispanic American Literature from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. In 2022, she published the book "El artista, el mal y la bella enferma: subversiones y resignificaciones de imaginarios decadentes del entre siglo en 'Hojas de mi álbum' (1903) de José Antonio Román," which reevaluates the contributions of José Antonio Román, an early 20th-century Peruvian writer often overshadowed in academic discussions about the turn of the century in that country. Her academic interests are focused on 19th and early 20th-century Hispanic American Literature and Cultures. Specifically, she aims to study the emergence of the Peruvian literary field in dialogue with other Hispanic contexts during this period of crisis and its relationship with the emerging ideological, aesthetic, and political projects of the time. |
|
Ezra received a dual B.A. in Gender & Women's Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an M.A. in Latin American and Latino Studies from the same institution. They have worked as a Mellon Fellowship assistant for the Inter-University Program for Latino Research and as an independent researcher at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. Their research examines how transnational anarchist networks have shaped sexual cultures throughout Latin America. They are particularly interested in late 19th and early 20th century literary works on amor libre written in the cities of the Rio de la Plata, where narratives of sexual deviance emerge as forms of self-expression and a site of class conflict. Their writing has appeared in publications like AREA Chicago and in the edited volume Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement. Their involvement in grassroots organizing against gentrification, displacement and immigrant detention is central to producing the ethics that inform their life's work. |
|
Nicolás is a researcher, writer, and curator whose work focuses on queer representations in contemporary literature. He is the founder of Club de Lecturas Maricas, a community space centered on the reading of queer fiction, and Ojo de loca, an Argentinian publishing house dedicated to LGBT+ narratives that challenge the limits of realism. In 2018, he joined the founding team of Orgullo y Prejuicio, the Sexual Diversity and Culture program of the Buenos Aires International Book Fair, where he has served as lead curator since 2023. In 2024, Nicolás earned a Master’s degree in Latin American Literary Studies from Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF) with his thesis Proyecciones utópicas en la narrativa gay contemporánea, awarded with honors. At the same institution, he currently teaches the graduate seminar La lengua de las locas within the Gender and Sexualities Studies program. Both his creative and academic work revolve around the figure of “la marica que especula” (“the speculating queer”), whose unbridled imagination becomes a symbolic platform for envisioning alternative ways of life —and alternative worlds. |
 Deisi CuateT6M3E7@u.northwestern.edu Deisi received her B.A. in Hispanic Studies from Wheaton College (MA). Subsequently, she taught 7th grade math in English and Spanish through Americorps as a teaching fellow in the South Bronx. Previously, she worked as a success college counselor in New York private and public colleges. Her research examines female literary representations of Latinx NY/NJ since the 1990s. She is particularly interested in how Latinx female-identified writers have problematized monolithic views of NY and its environs by reexamining the relationship between identity and space. |
|
Michelle Davó Ortíz Michelle Davó Ortiz is an arts administrator and researcher from Mexico City. She holds an MA in Art History and Arts Administration from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, supported by the Fulbright-Garcia Robles Fellowship, the Jumex Museum Scholarship, and the SAIC Pritzker Scholarship. Since 2018, Michelle has been the project coordinator of Archivo El Insulto, co-curating exhibitions such as “Please Touch: Embracing the Memories of Desire” at La Postal-Terremoto and “A Particular Collection” at Noche de Archivos Abiertos. Michelle is currently pursuing a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. Her research explores the intersections of sexuality, affect, and social justice within theoretical and historiographic aesthetics studies. |
|
Jose Marlon Hernandez Melendez Marlon holds a B.A. from James Madison University (2021) and M.A. in Hispanic Studies from Virginia Tech (2024). His research interests are collective memory, migration, displacement, and political instability due to the aftermath of Civil Wars in Central America. |
|
Hyerim Hong received her B.A. in Hispanic Language and Literature from Seoul National University (South Korea), where she also received her M.A. in Hispanic Literature. Subsequently, she worked as an intern at the Nation Theater Company of Korea, where she assisted in an incubating program for young directors and playwrights. Her interests include contemporary Spanish and Latin American theater, migration, race, and ethics. Hyerim’s works have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Sincronía and Journal of Arts and Humanities. |
|
Manuela holds a B.A. in Literature and a B.A. in Anthropology from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Her research explores the intersections of literature and anthropology in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Latin America, focusing on how gender, authorship, and social practices shaped the politics of representation and identity. She examines women’s writing and intellectual networks, considering how literature serves as ethnographic material in the processes of nation-building and in constructing social and cultural imaginaries. During her undergraduate studies, she curated a digital exhibition titled "A Cartography of the Female Republic of Letters: The Project of Soledad Acosta de Samper" for the Soledad Acosta Digital Library, which mapped transnational intellectual networks of nineteenth-century Hispanic women writers and employed digital humanities to question the canon and broaden the ways scholarship engages with wider publics. |
|
Roberto Katrandjiyski Robbie received his B.A. in Spanish and Economics from the University of Virginia (2017) and his M.A. in Spanish Language and Literature from the University of Maryland, College Park (2021). His pedagogical experience ranges from working with high school students through the Virginia Governor’s Academy of Spanish to teaching a variety of undergraduate Spanish language courses at the University of Maryland. His research interests include 20th and 21st century testimonial literature, identity formation, migration, race & gender studies, as well as the intersections of fiction and historiography primarily as they relate to marginalized populations in Central America, Mexico, and the US. |
|
Oana Alexan Katz gained an interdisciplinary perspective on migration studies through her B.A. in International Studies and Spanish at Macalester College and her M.A. in Human Rights and Humanitarian Action at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po). Following six years of nonprofit development work that channeled storytelling into grassroots social change, she returned to the humanities to explore resistant representational strategies through the prism of literary and cultural studies. Oana’s research spans the migratory experience in the contemporary Iberian and U.S. Latina/o/e/x contexts. She is intrigued by the emergent field of postmigration—a space for re-narrating social situations of mobility and diversity, as well as re-conceptualizing personal and collective identities in present-day Spain. Her affiliation with the Mellon Cluster in Critical Theory at Northwestern serves as a platform for applying critical studies of race, gender, and sexuality to identity formation. |
|
Heloísa Imada received her B.A. in Literary Studies (2017) from State University of Campinas. She also holds a Master's degree in Theory and Literary History (2021) from the same institution, where she was a CAPES scholar. During her Master's, she was also an invited researcher for the Médias19 project, coordinated by Prof. Dr. Guillaume Pinson at Université Laval (2020). Her interests are Visual Studies, Material Culture, and Press Circulation focusing mostly on the relation between fashion and literature in Latin American culture in the fin-de-siècle. Heloísa's research has been published in peer-reviewed journals Modapalavra and Revista Mídia e Cotidiano. |
|
AnamariaLeonBarrios2024@u.northwestern.edu Anamaría León Barrios holds a B.A. in Literature from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (Caracas, 2016), and an M.A. in Spanish Language, Literature, and Culture from Syracuse University (Syracuse, 2019). She was awarded the Gerlinde Ulm Sanford for Outstanding M.A. Student of Spanish and the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award at Syracuse University (2019). Anamaría also worked as an editor at Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho (2013-2017). She edited the book Llamas sobre el llanto by Cesar Rengifo, a collection of his main plays, and co-edited several books. She was Co-Chair in the Latin American and Caribbean Studies cluster (2022-2023) at Northwestern University. Her topics of interest broadly focus on the representations of racialized subjects in Latin American literature, specifically in literary texts from countries with a common geographic space through the Amazonian and Andean regions. Her research areas are race theory, eco-criticism, indigeneities, literary practices and testimony by indigenous peoples, and indigenist literature arching from the late nineteenth century, the twentieth, and the twenty-first-century literature in Latin America. |
|
Christian received his B.A. in Literature from Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, Peru. His work focuses on the indigenismo movement in the Andes, particularly on the literary representations of indigeneity in Peru from the late 19th to mid-20th century. His current research delves into the works of key Peruvian intellectuals, such as Dora Mayer, Luis Valcárcel, and José María Arguedas. In particular, he examines how they articulated new forms of relationality involving Indigenous communities and other societal actors within the framework of the modern projects of the time. |
|
Andrés Mendieta holds a B.A in Communication Studies from the National University of La Plata (UNLP) and a M.A in Gender Studies from the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF) in Buenos Aires, Argentina where he also teaches seminars in queer and trans* studies. During 2019 - 2020 he was an Andrew W. Mellon predoctoral fellow in the Critical Theory in the Global South Project at Northwestern University. He is also a research member in "Trans. Arch: Archives in Transition” an international research project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Research. |
|
Ethan A. Moscoso received B.A. degrees in Spanish and Philosophy from Grinnell College (2020), where he was advised by scholars working in the Colonial Latin American Literary, and Continental Philosophical traditions. He received an M.A. in Philosophy, with distinction, from DePaul university (2023), where he gained rigorous training in the Latin American and Continental traditions of Philosophy. At Northwestern, he is a Mellon Fellow in Critical Theory. His research centers the relationship between Andean studies and Latin American Philosophy. Currently, he is working on theorizing long-durée analyses of the region grounded in the methodologies of both Latin American and European thought. This project mediates itself by engaging with cultural production regarding questions of coloniality, secularization, and the planetary crisis. |
|
Yasmín received a B.A. in Theater Critic from the Cuban University of Arts (2007) and an M.A. in Spanish from the University of Oregon (2018). Her research examines the ways in which science fiction depicts politics, sexualities and families in the Spanish Caribbean Literature. She is particularly interested in studying Cuban cyberpunk, and Cuban female science fiction writers as Anabel Enriquez and Daina Chaviano. She has published essays in the feminist magazine Pikara, the social sciences journalTemasand the edited volumes Women Past and Present: Biographic and Multidisciplinary Studies(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), La isla y las estrellas. el ensayo y la crítica de ciencia ficción en Cuba(Editorial Cubaliteraria, 2015) and Anatomía de una isla. Jóvenes ensayistas cubanos(Ediciones La Luz, Cuba, 2015). Her fiction work had appeared in Antología de cuentos homoeróticos(Col. Homoerótica, vol. I, España, 2007), Antología de cue |
|
|
Gabriel Restrepo Parrado Gabriel obtained a double B.A in Philosophy and Literature (2016) and a M.A in Philosophy (2017) from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. During this time, his research focused on the poetry of Idea Vilariño and, on the philosophical side, on classical American pragmatism. Most recently, he completed an Erasmus Mundus M.A in Crossways in Cultural Narratives (2020) from Università di Bergamo, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and University of St Andrews. For this M.A, he wrote a thesis in which he explored the early narrative of Uruguayan author Mario Levrero in relation to postmodernism and theories of space. His areas of interest include pragmatism, ecocriticism, and philosophy of science. Within this framework, he would like to study Latin American science fiction and horror. Gabriel joined the Ph.D in Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University in 2020. |
|
Naomi Sanabria Aldana Naomi received her B.A. in History and Spanish, with a minor in Latin American Studies, and a Certificate in Public History from Rutgers University-New Brunswick (2022). She also holds a Master’s degree in Hispanic Studies from Boston College (2024), where she worked as a Teaching Fellow for Elementary and Intermediate Spanish courses. Her research focuses on the role of women and the relationship between Spain and Africa in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as the portrayal of women in films, magazines, and comics, and the perspectives from which they are represented. |
|
Sofía is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and a Mellon Interdisciplinary Cluster Fellow in Theatre and Performance. She holds a B.E.d. in Humanities and Spanish from Universidad Distrital "Francisco José de Caldas" in Bogotá, Colombia, and an M.A. in Hispanic Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She specializes in contemporary Latin American theater, with a focus on the role of performance as a tool for reparation and peacebuilding in post-conflict Colombia. Her doctoral dissertation is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork and direct collaboration with community-based theater initiatives in juvenile detention centers and among diverse communities of survivors of violence. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of plays, creative processes, and audience reception, she explores how performance becomes a site for negotiating memory, justice, and reconciliation in contexts marked by violence. |
|
Silvina Sartelli Silvina obtained her B. A. in Law and her M.A. in Latin American Integration from the National University of La Plata, Argentina. She also worked as a researcher in the same institution until the completion of her Master’s. During that time and thanks to the Erasmus Mundus scholarship, she spent a semester in the University of Salamanca. Later on, she became involved in literary studies and got a M.A in Iberian & Latin American Studies from the University of Notre Dame, USA. Her research interests focus on women writing, archival work and women representation at the beginning of the XX century. Additionally, Silvina is interested in creative writing and plans to publish her first short stories collection in the near future. |
|
Christian holds a B.Ed. in Humanities and Spanish from Universidad Distrital "Francisco José de Caldas" (2010). In 2015, he earned an M.A. in Literature from Universidad de los Andes, where he worked in the Writing Center as lecturer and coordinator of writing courses from 2015 to 2018. He is also a member of Himpar Editores, an independent publishing house settled in Bogotá, Colombia. His research interests include contemporary Latin American literature and Cultural studies. |
|
Jacob Wilkenfeld Jacob received a B.A. in English and Latin American Studies from the University of Connecticut at Storrs and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research examines the ways in which modernity and cultural hybridity have been thematized in Portuguese and Brazilian Literature. He is particularly interested in studying Jewish-Brazilian novelists such as Moacyr Scliar and Clarice Lispector, Afro-Brazilian writers such as Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and João da Cruz e Sousa, and the modernist movements of Brazil and Portugal. He has published articles in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and in the edited volumes The Limits of Literary Translation: Expanding Frontiers in Iberian Languages and Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet. |
Ana Alejos Ríos
Ezra Arreola Martinez
Nicol
Hyerim Hong
María Manuela Joven Muñoz
Oana Alexan Katz
Heloísa Imada
Christian Martinez Arias
Andrés Mendieta
Ethan A. Moscoso
Yasmín S. Portales Machado
Sofía Sánchez
