Ann Xiaoxu Pei is a PhD student in Comparative and World Literature program at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She works at the intersection of environmental humanities and memory studies, and is also an avid researcher in oceanic studies and waste studies. She holds a Masters in English from Nanjing University and was a visiting graduate researcher at UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for...

Kelsi Quick is a PhD student in the Political Science Department at the UIUC and a Research Assistant at the European Union Center. She has a strong interest in exploring the tension between the supranational structure of the European Union and the sovereignty/autonomy of the domestic state. Her engagement with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory is borne of a desire to critically...

G'Son is a PhD student in the Department of Communication. His interests traverse through social media, media effects, and political communication. His research dissects the consequences of affective polarization and the challenges faced by minority communities in the online sphere. Employing a blend of quantitative and qualitative tools, he leverages critical and interpretive frameworks to...

Paul Un is a Ph.D. student in Political Science, studying international relations. He holds a B.A. in Government from the University of Puget Sound, and an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago. Focusing on Southeast Asia, his research asks how foreign aid donors come to choose their recipients and how recipients (re-)claim agency for themselves in international...

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 colonialism constructs cities in the 21st century U.S., where settler colonialism...

Gabriela is a third-year Master in Architecture and Master in Urban Planning candidate. She is interested in how political and sociological awareness shape design and spatial production practices. Her current research project focuses on the relations of domination reflected in the management of urban architectural heritage and the production of public space in Latin American colonial cities....

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 its transcription into text, as well as Indigenous written forms that enter into conversation with...

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 spinal cord injuries. He has a keen interest in political geography, contemporary cultural conflicts...

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, he is interested in processes of digital transformation with a focus on Chile-China relations and...

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 Literature, especially on topics such as ideologies, violence, power structures, and democracy. Her...

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 the Ph.D. program with a focus on applied-philosophy. Based on postmodern views of human existence in...

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 normativity, and citizenship status within Latinidad overdetermines U.S. Latinx sociopolitical and ethnic...

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 (how Islamophobia influences legislation, policy, etc.). I am interested in the structures that...

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 school reforms and epistemic injustice in school systems (especially from a Post-Colonial and Post-...

Joe Bowie is a third-year MFA Candidate in the Dance Department with a Minor in Gender and Women’s Studies. His current creative research resides at the intersection of dance, Blackness, queerness, maleness, Black joy, and storytelling. In his dance-making, he uses autoethnography, embodied storytelling, and affective frameworks to foreground softness, tenderness, and...

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 “hybrids” in the contexts of the exotic pet trade, animal sanctuaries, and wildlife management...

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 punishment so I decided to specialize in legal and political philosophy. My dissertation offers a Kantian...

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 is interested in premodern critical race studies, affect theory, and gender and sexuality...

I’m Lettycia Terrones, an unlikely PhD student in Information Sciences and Latina/o Studies at Illinois. My project studies the confluence of pedagogical, aesthetic, and institutional investments that intersect at the site of Chicanx children’s literature and its use in children’s story hours in U.S. public libraries. I conduct oral histories with Chicana picturebook artists and Chicana...

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 artists extracted and enclosed so-called magical practices from the colonies to remake their art...

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 examines the role of rurality in the construction of political and national identities in contemporary...

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 and cultural spaces for gendered expressions and labor in West Africa. My interests in critical...

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 research interests lie in the relationship between cultural memory—particularly that of state...

¡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 methodologies and, racial identity and aesthetic standards.  Most of my research fieldwork at...

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 Contemporary Art.” Lilah has been a graduate affiliate of the Unit since the start of her MA as...

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 that literary modernism continued after the war in a modified form that often emphasized a sparse,...

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 material conduit towards tracing political and economic capital flows, unpacking emergent...

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 and Italian Department, where she earned an MA in Italian Studies in 2019. Now she is working toward...

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 across the globe. She completed her degrees in architecture and urban design at the University of...

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 what strategies this literature offers to deal with the environmental challenges brought about by the...

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 category, an emancipatory charge with the potential to liberate the human sensorium from...

Robin is a PhD student in the Department of French & Italian working towards a degree in French Linguistics with a focus in Romance Linguistics. Her dissertation project takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying discourses of marginalization and minoritization in Québec (1959-1980). For Robin, the Unit has been a great resource to expand her knowledges and perspectives in...

Michael Uhall is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the Political Science Department, where he studied with Samantha Frost and others. His research addresses a range of topics in political theory and philosophy, including conceptual engineering, new materialism, political ecology,...