Current Thematic Graduate Student Fellows

2022-2023 Thematic Graduate Student Fellows: Mending and Transforming

André Ramos Chacón

Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Morisco, Mestizo, and Indian Historians of the Spanish Empire: Identity and Writing in 16th Century Granada, Mexico, and Peru

André Ramos-Chacón (Cuzco, 1989) is a PhD candidate in Spanish. He studies 16th and 17th centuries Spanish-American literature, and 20th century Latin American literature focused on indigenous people and heritage languages.

André’s dissertation bridges 16th c. Spanish, Mexican, and Peruvian colonial studies through the analysis of post-conquest writing and identity in the Muslim Kingdom of Granada, the Indian Government of Tlaxcala, and the Inca State of Vilcabamba. He focuses on three authors: Miguel de Luna, Diego Muñoz Camargo, and Titu Cusi Yupanqui

André also studies Quechua, Nahuatl, and Latin, and favors interdisciplinary research through close reading, archival work, and second language acquisition studies (SLA).

Alex Korsunsky

Department of Anthropology

Se Acostumbra Uno a Trabajar: Labor, Tradition, and the Limits of Food Sovereignty Aspirations among Mexican Immigrant Farmers in Western Oregon

Alex Korsunsky is a PhD candidate in Anthropology finishing a dissertation on Mexican immigrant farmers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where he grew up. His ethnographic research focuses on food justice, labor, and the complex factors that lead farmers to embrace conventional or alternative environmental practices. He is also a grant writer with CAPACES Leadership Institute’s Anahuac Farm, an indigenous migrant food sovereignty program based in Turner, Oregon.  ”

Maren Loveland

Department of English

Vital Infrastructures: The Affects, Power, and Environments of Infrastructural Media

Maren Loveland is a dual-PhD student in English and Comparative Media Analysis and Practice whose research focuses on the relationship between media, infrastructure, and the environment. She specializes in twentieth-century literature and film studies, documentary studies, energy humanities, and critical race theory. 

Nicholas Tyler Reich

Doctoral Student, Department of English 

Nick Reich (he/they) studies how racialized gender and sexuality undergird energy infrastructure, as represented in regional literature and media. Check out their latest article in the Transgender Studies Quarterly: “Truck Sluts, Petrosexual Countrysides, and Trashy Environmentalism.”