The Humanities Institute Graduate Awards

Jonathan Van Harmelen

History

Debbie Durate

Literature

Caitlin Flaws

Literature

Caitlin Flaws (she/her) is a 3rd Year Literature PhD student at UCSC. She completed her BA in English and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at UC Davis and her MA in Literary Studies at Washington State University. At UC Santa Cruz, Caitlin studies disability studies, crip archives, and materiality.

Mark Howard

Politics

Mark Howard is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Politics and History of Consciousness departments at UC Santa Cruz. He previously studied Philosophy at Macquarie University and International Relations Theory at the LSE, and prior to that worked as a technology management consultant in the financial services industry. Disciplinary interests include political economy (especially critical finance studies), political and social theory, critical theory, and continental philosophy. His dissertation is a critical study of venture capital as a means, mode, practice and process of social reproduction and renewal.

Won Jeon

History of Consciousness

Marilia Kaisar

Film and Digital Media

Marilia Kaisar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Film and Digital Media with a designated emphasis in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She holds an MA in Media Studies from Pratt Institute and a Diploma in Architectural Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her experimental practice uses affect theory and a feminist perspective to explore intersections of media, technology, and desire, through the body. Her work has been published in MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research, Passage Journal, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Clog, and Mark Magazine. Her films have been exhibited in the Small File Media Festival, Bad Video Art Festival, and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art&History.

Merve Ünsal Genç

Film and Digital Media

Merve Ünsal is an artist, pursuing a PhD in Film and Digital Media at University of California Santa Cruz. She works around methods of tuning in. She thinks through the media of photography, video, radio, sound, performance, and site-specific installations. She is the founding editor of m-est.org

Gabriel Evans Cayley

Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Tamarack Free Library

Rafael Franco-Flores

Literature

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) Historical Society

Rebecca Gross

Literature

Lux Magazine

Rebecca Gross is a third-year graduate student in the literature department at UC Santa Cruz. Her research constellates Jewish and Black cultural objects and theory with one another to consider the radical potential of diasporic solidarity, internationalism, and intergenerational memory-keeping.

Piper Milton

History

Tumacácori National Historic Site

Wesley Viebahn

Literature

Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History

Joe Alicea

Literature

Clara Bergamini

History

Leonard Butingan

History

Lani Hanna

Feminist Studies

Melody Nixon

History of Consciousness

Vishal Sunil Arvindam

Linguistics

Christina Wang

History

Wyatt Young

History

Pablo Escudero

History of Consciousness

Pablo Escudero is an architect, author, and educator with expertise on urbanism, landscape and ecology from the Andean region of what it is nowadays Ecuador (Kichwan Territories). Trained at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, Pratt Institute, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, he is the founding director of La Minga, a collective action group and multimedia platform exploring the ways nation-building discourse in twentieth-century Andean and Amazonian regions worked to justify internal colonialism in the name of modernization. Currently he is a PhD student at the University of California Santa Cruz in the History of Consciousness Department. His transdisciplinary work investigates how modern ideas of underdevelopment/development govern the politics of time, most importantly through the reading of indigenous declarations antagonistic to modern ways of treating the earth as a resource. His work includes the colonial history of the Cinchona plant (the cure to Malaria) as found in the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale exhibit and recently co-authored book A Botany of Violence: 528 years of Resistance and Resurgence, Goff Books 2022.

Elliot Richardson

History

Elliot Richardson is a 2nd year PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His studies focus on transgender networks of care in the context of incarceration and migration within the United States and across the US-Mexico border. Elliot's background is in public history, starting his career the National Parks Conservation Association leading campaigns for the creation of new national parks preserving queer history. He then worked for the Transgender Historical District of San Francisco, conducting research to put the site of the Compton's Cafeteria Riot on the National Register of Historic Places. Through this work, he familiarized himself with Dr. Susan Stryker's personal archive of materials relating to the Tenderloin, digitizing over 300 items that were then made available to the public and utilized in the "Transition Times" exhibit at the Tenderloin Museum in February, 2024. Elliot is also utilizing these materials, along with oral history archives at the GLBT Historical Society, to construct a Master's thesis on transgender networks of care and carcerality in San Francisco's Tenderloin 1963-1975. Elliot also hopes to eventually use his academic studies to write historical fiction novels for young adults featuring transgender characters, recognizing the importance of trans youth having accessible representation in the past.

Brian Rivera Hernandez

Literature

Adriane Stoia

History

Grace Yun

Literature

Bart Feberwee

History of Consciousness

Kaiya Gordon

Feminist Studies

Jen Ham

History of Consciousness

Ania Mah Gricuk

History

Ania Mah Gricuk is a second-year Ph.D. student in the History Department. Her research interests include overseas Chinese migration and diaspora, with a particular focus on practices related to Chinese medicine, food, and drinks in Southeast Asia. Additionally, she is interested in networks of trade and migration that link China with overseas Chinese communities and challenge traditional geographies. She loves to cook and eat out (especially Chinese food) and call it "research".

Maria Pachon

Literature

Maria Isabel Pachon was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Texas at El Paso. Her work has been published in Literariedad, Rust and Moth, Rio Grande Review, among other journals. Her novel Sobre Tierra Quemada was awarded the 2021 Rosario Castellanos International Short Novel Award. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Literature with a Creative/Critical Writing Concentration at UC Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on the work of Latin American women writers who live in the United States.

Jonathan Paramore

Linguistics

Linda Ulbrich

History

Ke Zhao

History

Stefania Cotei

History of Consciousness

Stefania Cotei is a PhD student in the History of Consciousness Department and has a training background in sociocultural anthropology. Her research focuses on Romani populations in Europe, and the political, economic, and social transformations of postsocialist states. Her work draws on critical theory, political philosophy, and agential realism to address biopolitics, nationalism studies, as well as the (un)making of archives and history. She is also the co-creator of Autocorrect, a Romanian language podcast that engages artists, scholars, and writers into open dialogue about intersecting power dynamics in Romanian culture.

Ines Pedrosa e Melo

Film and Digital Media

Balakrishnan Raghavan

Music

David Shaw

Environmental Studies

Vidula Sonagra

Music

Vidula Sonagra is pursuing PhD in Cross-Cultural Musicology at the Music Department, UCSC. She has a Master's and MPhil degree in Political Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has over five years experience working with the Government of Maharashtra, India and in the Development sector. She has over ten years of experience orking as a freelance writer and translator. She has undertaken inter-disciplinary research projects related to caste, class and gender both at a theoretical level and action on the ground focused on creating concrete solutions for advocating for sanitation workers and for gender based violence. Her training and research interests in Music and music instrument makers, had led her to pursuing a PhD at the Music Department. Her research focuses on exploring creative labor of instrument makers in the context of caste hierarchy.