Erin Cheslow is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is interested in the ways in which oral forms emerged as a transnational aesthetic in the novels of the long nineteenth century. More specifically, her work examines sound and...
Meet Our Students
Gyudae "GD" Kim is a Ph.D. student in Geography and Geographic Information Science. He has a BS in Environmental Economics and an MS in Geographic Information Science from UIUC. He was granted the Neilsen Foundation Scholarship for four years, which supports academic success for students with...
Coming from Japan, Kei (pronounced kay-ee) joined UIUC in 2023 as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography and Geographical Science. His research interests lie at the intersection of urban geographies, settler colonial studies, and Indigenous geographies. He seeks to understand how settler...
Adrian Wong (he/him) grew up in Murrieta, CA, as third child in a bi-racial family of 6 with a Chinese-immigrant father and a white, 6th generation Californian mother. Currently a PhD student and FLAS fellow in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign...
Danielle is an MA student in Portuguese – Brazilian Studies at UIUC. She holds a Bachelor of Laws degree from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, as well as a Master’s Degree in Literature Studies from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. Her research focuses on Law and...
Alexandre Champagne is a Ph.D. candidate in Landscape Architecture. After a few years as a financial analyst, he pursued his education and received an MLA from Cornell University. With the aim of exploring how design professionals could have broader impacts on urban social well-being, he entered...
Stephanie studies teen Latinx girlhoods in media in the Institute of Communications Research. Her research broadly encompasses quinceañeras, racialization, friendship, chosen family, and tropes of Latinx girls and young women. She is interested in how the stratification of race, class, gender...
I am a PhD student in sociology interested in the intersections of religion and society. My research focuses on Islamophobia. I am interested in comparative studies of Islamophobia in the West and non-West. Mainly, I take up Islamophobia as a form of (systemic) racism and its role in state-building...
Martha Perez-Mugg is a Philosophy of Education PhD student in the Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership program. She holds an MA from Rice University in Philosophy and previously worked in "school turnaround" in Detroit and Denver. She is interested in philosophical critiques of neoliberal...
¡Saludos! My name is María B. Serrano Abreu and for this Fall 2021, I have been admitted to the QUERIES Ph.D. Program from the Educational Psychology Department at the College of Education. My research interest emphasizes in antiracist and afrocentrated education in Puerto Rico, qualitative...
Hi, I'm Ashli Anda. I'm a PhD candidate in philosophy. I received my MA from Boston College in 2016 where I studied Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Upon arriving at the University of Illinois, I realized I was interested in doing both history of philosophy and applied philosophy on issues related to...
Claire Baytaş is a PhD candidate in Comparative and World Literature at UIUC. In addition to being an affiliate of the Unit, she holds a minor in Cinema Studies, a graduate certificate from the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, and a CITL Graduate Teacher Certificate. Her main...
Joe (he/they) is a second-year Dance MFA candidate whose current and ongoing creative research investigates and foregrounds softness, tenderness, and gentleness among Black, queer moving bodies in dance spaces. He leads with giggles, whispers, shushing, and shared secrets. He prioritizes...
Soraya Cipolla is originally from Catania, a town in Sicily. She earned her Bachelor’s in Italian Literature and Linguistics at University of Catania. Then she completed her Master’s in Linguistics and Communications at the University of Siena, in Tuscany. She is a graduate student in the French...
Arkaitz Ibarretxe Diego is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures at the University of Illinois and is originally from Bilbao, Spain. He is a graduate student in the Spanish and Portuguese Department, where he earned an MA in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures in 2017. His research...
As a PhD student in linguistic and sociocultural anthropology, I follow the efforts of West African dance artists to develop sustainable careers in the region, with a focus on Burkina Faso. Specifically, I inquire into how women are resignifying contemporary dance performances to make new economic...
Hyeree Ellis (she/her) is a PhD student in the Department of English, specializing in Old and Middle English literature. She received her MA in English from UIUC, and her BAs in Sociology and English Literature from DePauw University. Driven by her curiosities with early global connections, Hyeree...
Austin (he/they) is a Ph.D. student in sociocultural anthropology. His work focuses on human-animal and human-canid relations, and how racial and colonial logics are articulated through them. His dissertation examines the political ecology between humans, the state, wolves and wolfdog crosses or “...
I am a PhD candidate in English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. My project explores how South Asian literature represents the capitalist exploitation of the environment and the environmental subaltern of the South in the interest of the global North and the Third World elite, and...
Patrick Kimutis is a Unit-affiliated graduate student and a Ph.D. candidate in the department of English. Patrick’s dissertation project explores the political and ethical dimensions of anti-fascism and anti-authoritarianism in experimental fiction in the wake of the Second World War. It argues...
Sabrina Lee is a PhD candidate in the Department of English. Her research interests include global modernism, critical theory, and ethnic studies. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Otherworldly Modernism: Magic, Mediums, and Coloniality,” examines how North Atlantic modernist authors and...
Lilah Leopold is a PhD candidate in art history. Her research interests include how contemporary art practices reimagine the land that supports shared agricultural heritage. The working title of her dissertation is “Countering Apocalypses Then, Now, and Tomorrow: Land Use, Resource Extraction, and...
Ian is a PhD student in musicology whose work on acousmatic sound (sound without a source or cause), and the set of phenomena known as the worldwide Hum, quixotically attempts to develop an anti-disciplinary methodology capable of granting music, a historically and culturally meaningful aesthetic...
Brian O’Neill’s research explores the relations of society to nature, using theories and methods from environmental sociology and political ecology. The bulk of his attention has recently been devoted to the market for desalination (turning the ocean into drinking water). He often uses water as a...
Nubras Samayeen is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint program of Landscape and Architecture. Her research focuses on the American architect Louis Kahn’s design. It probes the instrumentality of Western colonialism and modernism in homogenizing different worlds of distinctive tradition and culture...
