Abhinaya Kasagani (she/her)
Undergraduate Student
Abhinaya Kasagani is an undergraduate junior at UC Davis, working towards a A.B. in English and Cinema & Digital Media, with minors in Education and Professional Writing. Currently writing for The California Aggie and serving as Editor-in-Chief for Her Campus's UCD chapter, she enjoys thinking about certain texts in more sustained and substantive ways, peeling back layers to see what emerge. Her creative and critical sensibilities are continually evolving, and she is hopeful about refining her craft.
Aoife Arras (she/her)
Graduate Student
I am a first-year English Literature PhD student at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in Minneapolis. Before moving to the Twin Cities, I received by bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Aydin Jang (he/him)
Independent Scholar
Aydin Jang is a writer based in San Francisco with an MA in Philosophy from SFSU. His primary research interest at the moment is the role of affect and memory in political narratives, particularly those concerning contemporary social movements.
Christine Imperial (they/she)
Graduate Student
Christine Imperial is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies with a designated emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research. Their dissertation project theorizes blurring in late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial photographs of the Philippines. Her first book Mistaken for an Empire was published in 2023 with Mad Creek Books, Ohio State University Press' literary imprint.
Beni Ramos (they/them)
Undergraduate Student
Fourth year at UC Davis, with a double major in Political Science - Public Service and English! I love to get coffee and read non-fiction on my free time.
Casey Manogue (he/him)
Graduate Student
Casey Manogue is a PhD student in Education at UC Davis. His research interests include writing pedagogy, response to student writing, and writing conferences.
Corina Moran (she/her)
Graduate Student
Corina is a master's student from San Francisco State University where she's studying English literature. She hopes to graduate by this summer so that she may continue her education. Her interests are diverse but her studies tend to focus on the female experience in literature and fan fiction in literature.
Crystal Powell (she/her)
Graduate Student
Crystal Powell is a PhD student in Creative Writing & Literature at USC. She holds an MFA from NYU, where she was Interview Editor for Washington Square Review. She has received fellowships from The Center for Fiction, Jack Jones Literary Arts, NYU's Global Research Institute in Berlin, and Ewha Womans University in Seoul.
Deborah Tiner (she/they)
Undergraduate Student
Deborah Tiner is a senior undergraduate at the University of California, Davis, majoring in English and Communications. She is currently in the English Department's Critical Honors Thesis program, and her research focuses on gender and sexuality in modern literature.
Erik Emanuelson (he/him)
Graduate Student
Erik is a former high school English teacher and current PhD student in the English department at the University of California, Davis. His research research focuses on 19th century American literature, race and representation, and neoliberalism.
Gaoli Si (she/her)
Graduate Student
Gaoli Si is a PhD candidate in English and American Literature at Renmin University of China and a visiting research student at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests focus on Native American drama and Asian American literature.
Grace Wu (she/her)
Graduate Student
Grace Wu is a second-year MA student in the Department of Art and Art History at UC Davis. Her research projects center on Qing China (1644–1911), particularly the Manchu court’s claims to empire and dominion on global and local scales. She has presented her research on visual ethnography, encyclopedic plantscapes, and time-based decorative arts at Northwestern University; University of California, Los Angeles; and University of California, Davis.
Hannah Osborn (she/her)
Undergraduate Student
Hannah Osborn is an undergraduate student at UC Davis. Her areas of interest include English literature and medieval/early modern studies.
Heavenly Frazier (she/her)
Undergraduate Student
Heavenly Frazier is a third year English major, Human Rights minor interested in the intersection between human rights, technology, and the collapse of advanced civilizations. She is also a big fan of romcoms, astrology, and knitting.
Janayah Applon (she/her)
Independent Scholar
Recently graduating from University of California, Merced and earning her Bachelor’s in English, Janayah Applon is interested in becoming an English professor. Currently Janayah anticipates enrolling in a PhD program during the Fall 2026 semester.
Kari Stein (she/her)
Graduate Student
Kari is a first year PhD student in the English department. She is interested in Victorian literature, particularly the fin de siecle and the Gothic.
Manny Alonzo (he/him)
Graduate Student
Manny Alonzo is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on the intersection of disability studies and American literature, with particular attention to disability representations, embodiment, and narrative form. He has recently presented his work at the 2026 Disability Studies and Advocacy in Los Angeles Conference (DSALA), the 2025 PAMLA Conference, and the 2024 MMLA Conference.
Momo Djebli (she/they)
Graduate Student
I am Momo, a first-year American Studies doctoral student at the University of Minnesota with an intended minor in Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender, and Sexuality. My presentation focuses on the intersection of legal policy, political discourse, and cultural production in determining the legibility of gender nonconformity and sexual diversity within the confines of market freedom and US settler colonial empire making and its implications on the livelihood of racialized, mainly Black and Brown, gender nonconforming peoples. My interests are interdisciplinary in their nature as I aim to situate research on representations of gender culturally and legally in conversation with academic scholarship regarding militarism, US empire, and by extension the settler colonial project.
Nicholas Pérez (he/him)
Graduate Student
Nicholas Pérez is a third-year English literature PhD student at the University of Southern California. He received a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley. His research examines how literary form mediates the social production of the city, with particular focus to gentrification, anti-urbanism, and residential segregation as structuring logics.
Patrick Alemán Henslee (he/him)
Graduate Student
Patrick is a first-year English Ph.D. student at UC Davis. His research concerns the history and development of the California Central Valley. He is interested in Latinx/Chicanx studies, migration studies, and like many other UCD students, he now also finds himself gravitating toward the environmental humanities.
Prasad Sambhoo (he/him)
Undergraduate Student
I am undergraduate student at the English Department at UC Davis. I am interested in creative writing, my focus being literary fiction.
Rachel Wang (they/she)
Graduate Student
Rachel Wang is a third-year English Literature Ph.D. student at UC Davis. Their work compares women's fashion and identity in eighteenth-century British literature and contemporary literature/popular culture. They are interested in how figures gendered as female use clothing to design their own identity and femininity, but also how clothing is used by society to design these figures through sign systems.
Sansara Baniya (she/her)
Undergraduate Student
Sansara is a diehard romantic, cat owner, and English major at UC Davis. When she's not typing away in her notes app she is daydreaming of lazy summers in her rural hometown.
Shirley Guardado (she/her)
Graduate Student
Shirley Guardado received her A.A. in English from El Camino College. She transferred to UCLA, where she earned her B.A. in English with a minor in history. Shirley is currently completing her Master of Literature in English at California State University, Northridge.
Silver Ly (she/they)
Undergraduate Student
My name is Silver Ly, and I'm a 3rd year student at UC Davis currently studying English Literature (with an interest in fantasy and fiction as well as publishing) and Classical Civilisations (with an emphasis on classical receptions). I particularly enjoy dissecting the narrative and world behind story-driven video games and also am working on creating one of my own, as well as several novels based around the Trojan War.
Sung Yu (he/him)
Graduate Student
Sung Yu is an M.A. student in Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He studies archival “untranslatability” in relation to the literatures of colonialism, diaspora, and slavery, attending to figures silenced, erased, or rendered unknowable within official records. He is particularly interested in works by Toni Morrison, Slyvia Wynter, and Saidiya Hartman.
Taylor Johnson (she/her)
Undergraduate Student
My name is Taylor Johnson and I am from Long Beach, California. I am an undergraduate student (second year) majoring in English and minoring in French. I have a profound passion for writing and language.
Viktoria Bene (she/her)
Graduate Student
Viktoria Bene is an MA student in English Literature at California State University, Northridge. She received her BA in Narrative Studies from the University of Southern California. Her research engages comparative literature, diaspora studies, and transnational aesthetics, with particular attention to immigrant authorship and multilingual narrative form.