Graduate Student Directory

Luke Michael Bowe holds a BA in English with a minor in Cinema Studies from Colby College and a Masters in Sociocultural Analysis from the Complutense University of Madrid. His dissertation explores cultural representations of industry and rurality under Franco, specifically taking Asturias as a case study to analyze regionally specific events, discourses, and myths to illuminate tensions between rurality and industrialization in the broader context of Spanish nation building. Working with various materials including film, literature, graphic novels, and oral histories, his research takes a cultural studies approach to engage with the history and legacy of Francoism. He is the recipient of a 2022-2023 Fulbright US Student Research Grant at the Universidad de Oviedo. 

Ignacio Bajter is a literary critic, researcher and editor, and currently a PhD candidate in Spanish & Portuguese at New York University. His dissertation examines materiality and aesthetic ideas in the Latin American avant-gardes. At NYU, he has collaborated in web-archiving projects on Latin American visual cultures of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Before coming to NYU, he served as a researcher at the National Library of Uruguay, where he worked on archives and published articles on poetry and poetics, correspondences, criticism, and cultural history. He is also a scholar specializing in the pianist-writer Felisberto Hernández.

Manuel Viveros is a graduate student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at N.Y.U. He has an M.F.A. in Theatre Arts from the University of Louisville, and a Master of Government from ICESI. He is an actor and director with roles in theatre, T.V., and film in Colombia. His academic and artistic work focuses on Black Performance and Black Theatre, focusing on commonalities between the U.S. and Latin American Black Movements. He is currently working on a project that approaches the relationship between the ideas of Zora Neale Hurston, and Delia and Manuel Zapata Olivella.

Alejandra Rosenberg Navarro is a scholar of modern Iberian cultural studies, employing a multilingual and transatlantic approach to the study of the literatures and cultures of and beyond the Iberian Peninsula. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Transatlantic Lenses: Gender and Amateur Cinema in Iberia and Latin America (1920s–1930s),” compiles a corpus of women's amateur film practices in early twentieth-century Mexico, Brazil, the U.S., Spain, and Portugal. Alejandra holds an MA in Film Studies from Columbia University and a BA in Audiovisual Communication from Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona). Prior to starting her graduate studies, she was a film curator in Lisbon, an activity that she has continued alongside her scholarly work.

Luisa Marinho is an artist and Ph.D. student at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at GSAS/NYU (MacCracken Fellowship). She has an M.A. in Performance Studies from the Tisch School of the Arts/NYU (Emerging Scholar Award + NYU Tisch School of the Arts Departmental Fellowship) and an M.A. in Scenic Arts from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ/SEC Artistic Experimentation Award). Luisa is a member of Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory and project coordinator at SOS Providência, a crisis contingency committee responding to the COVID-19 pandemic at Favela da Providência, Rio de Janeiro. Her research dives into the diversity of magical and religious traditions from Brazil as they inspire anticolonial imaginations in contemporary artworks.  

Farah Dih holds a BA in English from the University of Valladolid (Spain), an M.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and an M.Phil. in Spanish from New York University. Her general fields of study are medieval and early modern periods in Spain and the Arab World, specializing in the Morisco and the Converso issues. She is currently a Dissertation Writing Fellow at NYU Abu Dhabi.

Jason Ahlenius’s dissertation explores the politics of labor and race in nineteenth-century Mexico’s borderland regions through literature, visual studies, contract, and other media. The project seeks to understand how Mexico, one of the first and most radical abolitionist nations in the Americas, justified and obscured practices of forced labor in agricultural capitalism in Tejas, Yucatán, and Chiapas. He has received fellowships from the Social Sciences Research Council, Fulbright-Hays Program, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and NYU’s Graduate Research Initiative to carry out archival research in Mexico, the U.S., Guatemala, Cuba, and Spain. He has also published his work on the sensational literature of the U.S.-Mexican War in Western American Literature.

Michel Nieva holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of Buenos Aires, where he was a teacher. Before joining NYU, he was also a translator and researcher at the CONICET.  His research interests focus on environmental humanities, contemporary art and literature, biopolitics and Amerindian cosmologies, history of science and technologies, history of extractivism and Indigenous land dispossession in the Southern Cone. He is also a science fiction writer and is the author of four books.

Ricardo holds a BA in Cinema Studies (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco), and an MA in Communication and Culture (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro). In his dissertation, he examines how extractivism in Brazil is historically yoked to colonial racialization processes and to the ongoing violence perpetrated against racialized communities. At the intersection of cultural studies, environmental humanities, and critical race studies, his research examines how the connection between extractivism and racialization directly shapes Brazilian culture through an interdisciplinary approach that analyses both colonial documents and contemporary cultural production. His work has appeared in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Contracampo - Brazilian Journal of Communication,  and Imagofagia - Revista de la Asociación Argentina de Estudios de Cine y Audiovisual. He is the co-author of the book Inúteis, Frívolos e Distantes: À Procura dos Dândis, written with Denilson Lopes, André Antonio Barbosa, and Pedro Pinheiro Neves.

Fan Fan researches the intersections between Asia and Latin America, with a focus on how economic and material transactions between the two regions impact everyday understandings of race, culture and geography. Her dissertation argues that far from being an economic phenomenon alone, the commodity trade between China and Brazil has seeped its way into the Brazilian imaginary to shape popular representations of race—as well as the way Brazil sees itself in the world—in literature, the visual arts, and film. 

Before her PhD, Fan Fan taught at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) on a Fulbright grant and led experiential education initiatives at The Hutong, Beijing’s premier cultural exchange venue. She is also an alumna of the Inter-University Program at Tsinghua University, for which she received a Foreign Language and Area Studies grant. At NYU, Fan Fan teaches Spanish and Portuguese language and literature and formerly coordinated Cross/Currents, the Bennett-Polonsky Humanities Lab on the intersections of migration and environmental change. She also works at the GSAS Office of Academic and Student Affairs to build out the university’s professional development initiatives for graduate students. 

Dantaé Elliott is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, She has a particular interest in contemporary Caribbean Art and its relation to migration within the Caribbean diaspora and region, while examining the phenomenon “barrel children syndrome.” To highlight migratory remittance and the relationship between a material object, that not only carries personal and emotional significance, but facilitates interpersonal interactions. She holds a B.A. in Spanish Language and Literature with a concentration in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) from Roanoke College and a M.A. in Spanish Language and Literature with a focus on Golden Age Literature in Spain from the University of Delaware. She is also the program assistant for the Caribbean Initiative workshop series at the Center for Caribbean and Latin American Studies at NYU. This summer she served as Co-Director for the CCCADI (Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute) Summer Seminar for their Curatorial Fellowship class of 2022/2023. She is currently working as an Editorial Assistant for Small Axe, A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. She is a featured artist in Volume 4 of Forgotten Lands, titled Currents of Africa, released in June 2022.

Bárbara Pérez Curiel is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She holds a B.A. in German (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and an M.A. in Spanish (University of Oxford). She has written, edited, and translated for Mexican and international media outlets and publishing houses. Her academic work focuses on 20th- and 21st- century Mexican literature, film and cultural studies; border studies; revolutionary cultures, and critical theories of the state. 

Michael Aníbal Rodríguez Montás is a PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures. He holds a BA in English with a Creative Writing Concentration from the University of Miami; an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras; and an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University. His research interests include approaching the shoreline as space and metaphor to explore listening, aesthetic experience, and archipelagic thought and relation. His primary motive for studying is a love for poetry, as a literary composition, but above all, as a quality of beauty. 

Fernando Bañuelos holds a B.A. in Hispanic Literature from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. He has published academic and public-facing criticism in Mexican, Spanish, and U.S. periodicals. His research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century Latin American literature from the perspective of sociological criticism, institutional analysis, new materialisms, and aesthetic theory. He is currently working on a dissertation project on publishing history, authorship, and literary form in Mexican literature from the mid-twentieth century to the present.

Laura Rojas is a writer, educator, and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at NYU. Her undergraduate background is in Literature at Universidad de Buenos Aires. She earned a Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing at NYU (2018). Her research focuses on migration, displacement, activism, and community relations.

Natalia Aguilar Vasquez is an interdisciplinary scholar of literature and participatory art in 20th- and 21st-century Latin America whose research focuses on social and post-colonial justice, gender-based violence, and community building in times of conflict in Mexico and Colombia. Her dissertation Animated Dwellings: Building Life Amidst the Violence. A Study of Livelihood in Colombian and Mexican Art and Literature explores how women and queer individuals face daily gender-based and economic violence in their homes or are deprived of accessing proper housing. She argues that a queer perspective of the home fosters renewed ideas of kinship and inclusivity in violent and machista societies. In 2020 she was selected as one of the Urban Doctoral Fellows at NYU, and in 2021 she was awarded an Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of Art & Science. Before joining NYU, she completed a MA in Contemporary Art from Leiden University, the Netherlands, and BA in Literature from Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. Her work has been published in the anthology Latin American Culture and The Limits of the Human, University of Florida Press, 2020, and in Vista, Journal of Visual Culture.

Nadia Villafuerte (México, 1978), studied music and journalism. Her published works are two books of short stories, Barcos en Houston (Conaculta, 2005) and ¿Te gusta el látex, cielo? (Conaculta, 2008); and the novel Por el lado salvaje (Ediciones B, 2011). She is included in the anthologies México 20: New Voices, Old Traditions (Pushkin Press, 2015) and Palabras Mayores, nueva narrativa mexicana (Malpaso Ediciones, 2015), among others. Her short stories and essays have been published in Colombia, Panamá, México, Cuba, Argentina, Spain, and the United States. She received an MFA from the Creative Writing Program in Spanish at NYU, where she is finishing a PhD in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures. Her research interests are migration and borderlands studies, Central American and Mexican literatures and cultures. Her dissertation focuses on the borderlands between Guatemala and Mexico and those more subjective borders imposed by history such as race.

Susana Costa Amaral is a transdisciplinary researcher working at the intersections of the fields of performance, politics, critical theory, and queer-of-color critique. She holds an MA in Performing Arts from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, same institution where she completed her BA in Social Communication with emphasis on Film. In Spring 2022, she was a Visiting Graduate Student Fellow at the Global Research Institute in Berlin. Currently, she is a Doctoral Candidate at New York University and her upcoming dissertation focuses on Brazilian contemporary art and far-right politics. Originally from Rio de Janeiro, Susana lives and works in New York.

Tatiana Rojas Ponce is a Venezuelan cultural researcher, feminist activist, and documentary filmmaker, currently pursuing a dual degree in the Spanish and Portuguese doctoral program, and the Culture and Media Certificate at NYU. Combining psychoanalitic and techno-feminist approaches, her work delves around the entanglements between bodies, subjectivities and technologies of visibility and montage in literature and visual culture. Her ongoing dissertation explores technologies of abortion and pregnancy in the Latin American cultural archive of the twentieth and twenty-first century. She has worked as editor, postproduction coordinator, director, and producer in a variety of award-winning documentaries related to Latin American Indigenous movements, feminist struggles, migration, and the relashionships between art and labor. Tatiana has twice won the best film editing prize of the Santiago Álvarez International Documentary Film Festival in La Habana, Cuba (2015; 2018). She holds a BA in literature from the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV) and has been an active member of several research groups affiliated with the Latin American New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis (NEL).

Gabriel Carle (San Juan, 1993) completed a BA in Creative Writing at UPR-Río Piedras and an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish at NYU. Current research interests center on disaster poetics, queerness, race, gender, and migration in Caribbean expressive cultures. Besides winning literary prizes in UPR and U. of Houston, Mala leche (short story collection) was published in 2018.

Patricia González Castelucci is a graduate student in Spanish and Portuguese. She holds a B.A in Liberal Studies from Universidad Metropolitana (Caracas). Her research interests include gender studies, queer studies and the intersections between image, literature and art in Latin American cultural production during de 20th and 21st century. 

Grecia was born on the Mexican border with the U.S., in Ciudad Juarez, where she earned a BA in Hispanomexican Literature and an MA in Literary Studies. She has interests in theater and performance studies, decolonial thought, intersectional feminisms, and pedagogies concerning these fields.