Neena Albarus is a doctoral student in the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research experience spans structural violence, community resilience, and the intersections of policy and public health, with particular attention to underrepresented and historically marginalized regions in Jamaica and the Caribbean. Neena’s work draws on multi-method approaches, and she has contributed to research on violence prevention, substance use, and community development. Her publications include peer-reviewed journal articles and technical reports that...
Lena Chen is an artist and Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Her research examines the performance practices of Asian American/diasporic artists, sex workers, and community organizers in Los Angeles and New York City. A recipient of the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, she holds a B.A. in Sociology from Harvard University and a M.F.A. in Fine Art from Carnegie Mellon University.
Her work has appeared in Amerasia Journal, PUBLIC...
Blake De Luca (he/they) is a PhD student in the Department of Italian Studies.
Their research applies queer studies to Early Modern Italy (1300-1650), examining genderqueer figures on two parallel planes: that of representation, which analyzes the tropes, recurring rhetoric and general treatment in literature and visual arts, and the sociocultural, which considers medical and legal documents to more clearly reconstruct the categorization and attitudes towards gender binarity in the Early Modern.
Josephine (Josie) Ingram (she/her) is a doctoral student in the Language, Literacy, and Culture cluster at UC Berkeley's School of Education. Her research interests include LGBTQ+ studies in education, creative writing pedagogy, queer literacy frameworks, digital learning spaces, and artificial intelligence in education. Her current project explores how informal learning spaces can support literacy development and identity formation for transgender and gender-expansive individuals.
Previously, Josie taught English, creative writing, and film in the Los Angeles Unified School...
Hasan Henry (he/him) is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests lie in issues of racial modernity, Black masculinities and gender, and the sociology of sexuality, situated within an interdisciplinary framing that includes DuBoisian Sociology, Black Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Hasan's current project concerns the social antecedents to the formation of sexual desire, investigating how contemporary sexual practices, desires, and representations of Black sexuality have been shaped by the colonial encounter and its afterlives—...
Jennifer (she/elle/ella) works across the fields of (socio)-linguistics, queer theory, trans theory, and feminist theory. To date, she has conducted research on New York City English, language attitudes and ideologies in the French press, and non-binary Romance language varieties. Her dissertation project applies the lenses of queer theory and transfeminism alongside methods of linguistic ethnography to examine the language practices and linguistic attitudes and ideologies within francophone queer, trans, and non-binary communities in Montreal. Through a combination of...
Miguel Samano is a Ph.D. candidate in English with research interests in Relational Ethnic Studies, Chicanx and Latinx studies, Asian American Studies, Social Science History, and Sociocultural Linguistics. Their dissertation, "Talk's Stories: Sociocultural Linguistics and Latinx and Asian American Narrative Forms," historicizes post-1965 Latinx and Asian American literary narrative's interest in the formal patterning of stranger-to-stranger talk over and against that of sociocultural linguistics, an interdisciplinary formation in the social sciences. They previously co-coordinated the...
Alex K. Torrez (They/Them) is a Chancellor’s Fellow at UC Berkeley. They are broadly interested in questions at the nexus of Identity Classifications such as race, gender, and sexuality, Medical Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Organizations. Currently, these interests have led Alex to explore understandings of care in clinical settings, genomics, and the development of recruitment strategies for scientific study and organ donation.
Halle Young is a PhD candidate in the Joint Medical Anthropology program at UCSF-UC Berkeley, where she researches the therapeutic milieu of vulvovaginal pain. Her project explores what practices and ideals of intimacy and gender inspire cisgender women to engage in interventions toward penetration, especially when pain is present.
