Participants

De/Postcolonial Studies

Daniel Andrade Amaral writes fiction, translation, critical theory, and music. He holds an MEd from UMass Lowell and MFA from Oklahoma State University. He studies process philosophy, theories of revolution and power, and minor literatures in a Deleuzian and decolonial vein. His overall project is to make ineffable events, namely sadness and the absurd, speak.

Jade Yeen Onn is a PhD student in English, specialising in Rhetoric and Composition. Her research interests are centered on the way Southeast Asian anglophone literatures function as postcolonial technologies, and how they re-assemble the rhetoric of transnational development as it emerges within and through this ecology.

Johannes Shephard

Manasvini Rajan is a PhD student in Literature. She holds a BA in English from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi and an MA in the same discipline from the University of Warwick. Her research interests lie in the fields of postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities, particularly in understanding what forms of writing can tell us about histories of development and hydrocolonialism in independent India.

Mitia Nath is a doctoral candidate in the English department. Her research interests include postcolonial literature and theory, the global anglophone novel, critical caste studies, environmental humanities. Her PhD project is an inquiry into discourses of filth in late-colonial India, with attention to anti-caste and anti-colonial movements of this period. Her work has been published in Interventions and South Asian Review.

Pooja Shah is a PhD student in English at UMass Amherst. She is interested in the relationship between sense memory and iterations of carving as possibilities for engaging with Indian Ocean waters. 

Critical Geographies

Alejandro Beas Murillo (he/him) is a doctoral candidate in the English department at UMass Amherst. Alejandro's research explores the legacies and praxis of marronage in contemporary Afro-Caribbean fiction, staging a conversation between hegemonic cultural-nationalist renderings of the maroons and Black feminist and queer reimaginings of marronage.

Alejandro has been an educator for more than a decade, teaching at the elementary and high school levels in his home country of Spain and at the college level at Williams College and UMass. He has also been a faculty member at Thrive Scholars for the past three years. He owes everything he has and knows to his maternal grandparents, Genoveva and Pepe.

Chris Costello 

Meenakshi Nair (she/her) is a PhD student in English. Her interests include South Asian literature, cities, and translation (working between Hindi/Urdu and English). She has an MA in Comparative Literature from SOAS, University of London and a BA in English from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi.

Phoebe Glick is a PhD student in English with a concentration in American Studies. Her research draws from the tradition of historical and dialectical materialism to theorize 20th century literature and culture, as well as counter histories of cultural hegemony and antiradicalism. She has an MFA in poetics from Pratt Institute.

Rachel Smith Olson is a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric. Her research explores how individuals conceive of their identities in digital spaces, especially in relation to online social activist movements. She works as a Graduate Teaching Associate and as an Editorial Assistant for Peitho, the journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. In her free time, she enjoys going to concerts and hanging out with her cat.

Vika Mujumdar was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst, where she is currently an MFA student in Fiction. Her work has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, the Chicago Review of Books, Girls on Tops READ ME, the Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.

Mobility & Migration Studies

Christina Muoio (she/her) is a third-year MA/PhD student in Literature on the Early Modern and Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies track. Originally from Southern California, Christina earned her Bachelor’s Degree in English at UC Santa Barbara, where she specialized in Renaissance literature. Christina’s research is primarily focused on mixed-race studies and the exclusion of mixed-race characters from the Early Modern literary canon, but she is also interested in depictions of interracial relationships, queer theory, disability studies, and gendered epistemologies. At UMass, Christina is a REAL Fellow, and she teaches a First Year Seminar on queer theory and Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”. 

Eunjin Cho

Jeremy Geragotelis is an MA/PhD student in English with a concentration in American Studies. Their research focuses on sites of failure, the performative act of breaking, repercussions of reiteration/repetition, and issues of embodiment relating to technologies of recording. Along with their scholarly work, they are a performance-maker, playwright, and composer. They have an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop.

Olivia Barry is a fifth year in the Literature MA/PhD program. Her research explores materiality, mobility, and disability in early modern drama and performance. Olivia has taught in the English department, writing program, and for the Humanities and Fine Arts College. She is currently the Editorial Fellow for English Literary Renaissance.

Saadia Peerzada is a graduate student of English at UMass Amherst. She is interested in possibilities of creativity and alterity inside systems of persecution, as moments of fissure where life is affirmed. Her creative work has appeared in San Antonio Review, and Inverse Journal and is forthcoming in Critical Muslim.