Mallory Asis (she/her) is a 4th-year undergraduate majoring in English under the mentorship of Professor Andrew Way Leong. Her research focuses on contemporary experimental feminist diaspora poetics as a means of cultural decolonization. Through close analysis of Megan Fernandes' poetry collection, I Do Everything I'm Told, Mallory bridges feminist postcolonial theory, diaspora poetics, and affect theory to unravel how Fernandes' subversion of the heroic crown of sonnets via erasure poetry rebels against modes of hegemonic...
Kelly Chuang is a fourth-year double major in English and Rhetoric. Her thesis tracks how problems of ocular vision in science fiction literature complicate the first- and third-person unreliable narrator, problematizing at large the relationship between vision and power both within and outside literature. The ultimate goal of her research and undergraduate studies is to teach science fiction studies and narratology at the collegiate level — and after teaching her survey DeCal, “There is Something So Romantic About Space,” she is sure about committing to (hopefully!) a life...
Salem Jiang is currently a third-year student pursuing simultaneous degrees in Society & Environment and Geography. They are interested in the racial and geographic patterns in environmental law and policy, conservation, and justice. Their research sits at the intersection of both their degrees, focusing on how law and policy impact racial geographic patterns, and the impact of social structures on the environment. Currently, their topics of interest include environmental racism, dual-use, and the military’s role in conservation research and...
Kiana Sezawar Keshavarz is a fourth-year student pursuing a BA in Sociology. Her growing research interests include comparative approaches to economic sanctions, as well as historical sociology and critical political economy. Kiana enjoys making jewelry and learning Spanish in her free time.
Melanie Magaña (she/her/ella) is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and raised in the Inland Empire. Her project examines the preservation and revitalization of Indigenous languages. Her research examines how Indigenous languages in literature assert cultural sovereignty, protection, and vulnerability, and why there is significance surrounding the teaching of language on the land, as well as the influence of the relationship between elders and youth on the future of Indigenous language. The project explores the role of Indigenous languages in connecting characters to land,...
Vivian Mata (she/her) is a third-year undergraduate studying English and Philosophy at UC Berkeley. Her research interests center on the intersections of gender, sexuality, shame and moral authority in medieval literature. She is particularly interested in how Chaucerian texts engage with theological and philosophical understandings of desire and suffering while navigating narratives of sexual transgression. Vivian hopes to pursue a PhD in English and become an educator, creating and contributing to spaces where students feel welcome to question religious hypocrisy both...
Diego Montesinos (he/him) is a fifth-year student pursuing degrees in English and Data Science. His research focuses on the connections between American literature and physical sciences from the early to late nineteenth century. Diego's thesis considers Emily Dickinson's poetry on wind and storms alongside a broader nineteenth-century American turn toward meteorology, both as a subject of growing public and cultural fascination and as an increasingly organized national scientific project. Beyond the classroom, he leads the maintenance and preservation of the UC Berkeley...
Vincent Nghiem is an East Bay native majoring in Geography and Environmental Science with minors in City Planning and Geospatial Information Science and Technology. He specializes in qualitative and geospatial methods to investigate his research interests in urban and economic geography, critical environmental studies, and histories of people’s struggles, local and global, as well as how they intersect with environmental justice and decolonial movements. After graduating in 2028, Vincent hopes to pursue a PhD in Geography or explore a career in public transportation...
Soph Padua is a third-year UC Berkeley undergraduate student pursuing a simultaneous degree in English and Conservation & Resource Studies. As a Filipino-American, Soph is working through the impacts of colonial forces and land dispossession that systemically and continuously harm their communities. Through literary research in ecological poetry, Soph hopes to delineate the relationship between Indigeneity, diaspora, eco-motherland, and return. Soph believes in the power of ecological poetry as a medium that can recursively and temporally preserve and revitalize...
