Participants' Bios

Ali Wiederhold (she/her/hers)

Undergraduate Student

Ali Wiederhold is a second- year undergraduate student majoring in English and International Relations. Her research interests involve ancient and medieval history, modern politics, and religion. When she is not studying, she enjoys reading, creative writing, watching movies, and traveling. 

Aliza Theis (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student

Aliza Theis is a second-year PhD student in English at UCB. She plans to research nineteenth-century American intellectual history, with a particular focus on print culture, science, and coloniality. Aliza also received a Master's in Education from Harvard GSE and taught high school English for seven years in Brooklyn and San Francisco.

Amanda Hawkins (they/them/theirs)

Graduate Student

Amanda Hawkins’ debut poetry collection, When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones, is just out with Wandering Aengus Press. They are a Tin House, Bread Loaf, and Mellon Public Scholar, winner of the Editor’s Prize for poetry from The Florida Review and the Emerging Writer Award from Key West Literary Seminar. 

Audrey Chiang (she/her/hers)

Undergraduate Student

Audrey Chiang is a fourth-year English and Design major with a minor in Professional Writing. She is passionate about creative writing and video production. Her poetry is rooted in surrealism, synesthetic imaginings, and nature, while her nonfiction is a mosaic of imagery and realization.

Autumn Andersen (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student

Autumn Andersen is a graduate student at UC Merced pursuing her PhD in interdisciplinary humanities. Her focus is on Literature, specifically Latinx contemporary literature. 

Bex Jones (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student

Bex Jones researches relations between air pollution scientists, environmental and health policymakers, and concerned breathers in London. Her PhD thesis focuses the use and affect of metrics in communicating about the risks of air pollution and the development of mediating interventions. 

Bradley Scott Morrison (she/her/hers)

Undergraduate Student

Bradley Scott Morrison is a student at Montana Western, and is finishing up her final year. She has been working seasonaly at Lewis and Clark Caverns Statepark for the past six years, and intends to make a career out of working in the parks system.

Brennan Havens (he/him/his)

Graduate Student

Brennan is an MFA candidate from Davis. He currently is working on building a short story collection. 

Camille Nava (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student

Camille Nava studies a range of writing and teaches volunteer poetry classes in area jails and at the public library. Originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, she calls the Pacific West home.

Caroline Risacher (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student

Caroline Risacher is a second-year PhD student in the department of Cultural Anthropology at UC Davis. After graduating with a degree in International Relations and Human Rights Law, Caroline worked as a journalist and editor-in-chief in Bolivia for a magazine covering topics related to culture and politics. She researches lithium extraction in the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, exploring its social, economic, historical, and ecological dimensions.

Celeste Navas (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student

Celeste Navas is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Cultural Studies Graduate Group at UC Davis. Her dissertation, Critical Latinx Placemaking: Community and Counterculture in Southern California’s Inland Empire (1990-present) examines how Latinx artists from the Inland Empire utilize their presence to act as both cultural producers of original artwork and participants in intracultural discourse related to placemaking strategies in the region. She was raised in the Inland Empire and is deeply invested in telling the stories of its residents. Her research interests are race, space, power, unbelonging, racial capitalism, California’s political economy, geography, labor, and public history.

Douglas McBride (he/him)

Graduate Student

Douglas McBride is a dad, a husband, a son and a writer. He’s still working on all of these things, as well as everything else, and he is thankful to be a part of this group.

Deborah Tiner (she/her/hers)

Undergraduate Student

Deborah Tiner is a double major in English and Communications, with an interest in the publishing field. She loves reading, writing, and helping other people hone their own writing skills. She is particularly interested in a feminist and queer lens when critiquing literature. She loves to hike with her Border Collie, Ruby, and her wife. 

Dylan Heier-Ross (she/her/hers)

Undergraduate Student

Dylan Heier-Ross is a former bread baker now pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing with a focus on poetry, and he is interested in exploring the relationship between lyric poetry, perception, and ecology. 

Ellen Humbert (she/her/hers)

Undergraduate Student

Ellen Humbert is a traditional college student in her sophomore year. She grew up in Montana and is going to the University of Montana Western as an English major with a professional writing minor.

em irvin (they/them/theirs)

Graduate Student

em irvin is a PhD student in Performance Studies at UC Davis who asks ceramic questions working with(out) clay as a question: how is clay, as presence and orientation? irvin recently won 2nd prize at the Biennale of Contemporary Keramics in Santorini, Greece (2024). 

Emily Davis (she/her/hers)

Undergraduate Student

Emily Davis is an undergraduate student at Montana Western. She is getting her English degree to become an author and/or journalist and is being published in September.

Emma Katherine Lee (she/her/hers)

Undergraduate Student

Emma Katherine Lee is a first year biochemistry major that loves both movies and literary critiques! Some of her favorite films are Parasite, The Virgin Suicides, and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

Erika Tsimbrovsky (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student

A Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at UC Davis, Erika Tsimbrovsky is a choreographer/multidisciplinary artist and cofounder/artistic director of Avy K Productions (SF). Her choreographic research highlights multimedia dance installation, dance, visual art, text interplay, and new relationships for the artist-performer-audience. She is interested in dance artists’ writings, looking at their essays and personal, intimate texts and focusing on dance thinkers-practitioners who rebel against conventional forms of both dance-making and text-making. 

Ester Rosdiana Sinaga (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student

Ester Rosdiana Sinaga is a researcher passionate about exploring the intersections of traditional knowledge and modern science. Her work centers on uncovering and preserving cultural heritage, with an emphasis on ethnobotanical practices and community-based research among Indonesia’s indigenous communities and Indonesian migrants in the United States.

Ethan Kekoa Turner (any)

Undergraduate Student

Though Ethan Kekoa Turner was born in Colorado, they have been raised in Hawaii for the vast majority of their life. After a brief flirtation with community college during the COVID-19 epidemic, they went on a year hiatus for self-improvement. Ultimately, they have come to rest at the University of Montana Western, where they are double majoring in English as well as Interdisciplinary Studies.

Florie Mankarious (she/her/hers)

Undergraduate Student

Florie is a fourth-year undergraduate Design Major and French minor. She is passionate about capturing the world around her through video production, textile work, and fine art. Her work is often inspired by and rooted in nostalgia, family, and the environment.

Florencia Milito (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student

Florencia Milito was born in Argentina and moved to the U.S. when she was nine. Her latest bilingual chapbook Sor Juana was co-winner of the Alta California Chapbook Prize and published in 2023 by Gunpowder Press.

Francisco Baeza (he/him/his)

Graduate Student

Francisco Baeza is interested in how imagined futures turned into built realities. He is also interested in how climate futures can help us imagine new possibilities in the face of the climate catastrophe.

Grace Li (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student

Grace Li is a first-year PhD student in Literature and Creative/Critical Writing at UCSC. Her individual poems have been published in swamp pink, Tupelo Quarterly, North American Review, and other literary journals, and she is working on her first poetry chapbook, titled "Wahlheim." 

Grace Wu (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student

Grace Wu is a first-year art history MA student at UC Davis. Her art historical interests primarily center around global interactions unfolding between the long sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has presented on themes of imperialism, Indigenous-colonizer relationships, and early modern ethnography at Northwestern University and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Iliya Giyahchi (he/they)

Graduate Student

Iliya Giyahchi is a Ph.D. student in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis on Science and Technology Studies at UC Davis. His research focuses on the performativity of protests, the transformation of public spheres in the post-digital era, and the women's rights movement in Iran, analyzing its cyberactivism, networked structures, and posthumanist elements. He integrates these frameworks into new media art and performances. With affiliations to ModLab at UC Davis and leading Iranian theater centers, Giyahchi’s interdisciplinary practice includes alternate reality games inspired by investigative journalism and collaborations on acclaimed projects like Danger of a Cluster Bomb and Zugzwang.

Jacob Aldred (he/him/his)

Graduate Student

Jacob Aldred is a current PhD student in sociocultural anthropology at UC Davis, specializing in studying contemporary environmental-economic issues regarding climate change and post-carbon transitions. He is a migrant from Australia seeking to practice presenting, listening, and networking at academic conferences to further build his desired career in research/academia. 

Jade Meshew (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student

Jade Meshew is a first year MFA student. Her interests are in eco poetics and the power of the persona poem. Her poetry explores themes across identity and personhood, love and loss, and relationships within and to, the natural world.

Jennifer Fergesen (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student

Jennifer Fergesen is a first year PhD student in the English department at UC Davis. She also holds an MA in creative writing from the department and edits a literary magazine based in Svalbard, Norway. 

Jessica (Jess) Fechtor (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student

Jessica Fechtor is a first-year MFA candidate in Creative Writing at UC Davis. 

Joseph Recupero (he/him/his)

Graduate Student

Joseph Recupero is an urban anthropologists studying place-making and memory practices in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He received his Bachelor's in Anthropology and Political Science from Gettysburg College and his Master's in Anthropology from Columbia University. 

Katrina Katzenbach (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student

Katrina Katzenbach received her MA from UC Davis and is currently a PhD student. Primary areas of research include postwar reconstructions of identity as seen through the visual and performing arts, the dynamics between formal and pop culture, and the role of gender in postwar nation construction. 

Lucy Hauskins (she/her/hers)

Undergraduate Student

Lucy Hauskins is currently a junior at the University of Montana Western studying English and Secondary Education. She is a lover of all things outdoors and is looking forward to sharing her passion of books with my future students. 

Madisen Hastings (she/her/hers)

Undergraduate Student

Madisen is a student at the University of Montana Western. She is a Montana local who plans on getting an Interdisciplinary degree and working as an academic advisor at a university or college.

Mandy Situ (any)

Undergraduate Student

Mandy Situ is a second-year genetics and genomics major with a love for learning. She straddles academia's perceived line between humanities and science, aiming to bring a critical eye to her biology education under US empire. With interests in gender studies, Asian American studies, molecular genetics, eugenic histories, and even set design, she seeks to become an interdisciplinary learner that refuses to be put in a box.

Manuel Alonzo Jr. (he/him/his)

Graduate Student

Manny Alonzo is an English major specializing in disability studies and will be a first-year PhD student at UC Davis in the Fall of 2025. His work has been shared at conferences such as the 2024 MMLA and published in outlets like Prism and Penumbra Online Journal, focusing on the intersection of disability, identity, and lived experiences.

Miles Jordan (he/him/his)

Graduate Student

Miles B. Jordan is a self-taught photographer who received his MFA in photography from the University of Alaska. Jordan’s work has been showcased in nearly half of the United States. His photography, which spans digital, analog, and infrared mediums, explores cultural and environmental transformation. His solo exhibitions include "504-907" at Macomb Community College (2024), the University of Alaska Fairbanks (2024), and "The Yellow Chair Series" at the Alaska Centennial Center for the Arts (2023). He has exhibited nationally in group shows such as "Surreal Salon 17" at the Baton Rouge Gallery (2025), "13th Annual Louisiana Contemporary" at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (2024), the "49th International Art Show" at the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art (2024), and the "62nd Stockton Art League National Juried Art Exhibition" at the Haggin Museum (2024). His work has received awards, including recognition at the 49th International Art Show at the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Anthropology at Louisiana State University. 

Rachel Wang (they/she)

Graduate Student

Rachel Wang is a second-year 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. 

Raquel Little Eagle (she/her/hers)

Undergraduate Student

Rachel Little Eagle is a senior at the University of Montana Western. She will be getting an Associate's degree in Creative Writing and a Bachelor's degree in Professional Writing. 

Rebecca Paige Shandy (she/her/hers)

Undergraduate Student

Rebecca Shandy is an English Secondary Education major at the University of Montana Western. She is in her third year of her undergraduate program and will graduate in the spring of 2026. 

Rhiannon Murdoch Kalsta (she/her/hers)

Undergraduate Student

Rhiannon Murdoch Kalsta is a fifth generation Montana rancher. A recent change of heart has brought her into the humanities, but she has spent most of her academic career in the bio department. She has worked in the Alaska fishing industry, has been a pageant queen, and has gone wherever the wind blows in search of stories and connections.

Sanna (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student

Sanna S. Lehtinen (MSc, MA) is a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki (Finland). Her study field includes critical environmental law, climate fiction, blue humanities, (eco)feminist theory, and spatial justice. In addition to legal studies, she has a background in art research. Her multidisciplinary PhD project explores coastal and liminal landscapes that are drowning because of the ecological crisis. She has served as a Visiting Scholar at UC Davis (2022–2023) and conducted a research period at Università Ca' Foscari Venezia (2021).

Selika McGlynn (she/her/hers)

Undergraduate Student

Selika McGlynn is from Butte, MT and is studying for my Bachelor's in English. Selilka loves to read and write as well as learn new ways to dissect pieces from different times and places. 

Sonia Boughaffour (she/her/hers)

Undergraduate Student

Sonia Boughaffour is an undergraduate student seeking a Bachelor's in English, with minors in Psychology and French. She is interested in research involving tracking literary patterns and contradictions, exploring specifically depictions of femininity in literature. 

Soph Green (they/them/theirs)

Graduate Student

Soph Green is a genderqueer Black and Filipino writer from Trenton, NJ. They are currently a second year English Master’s student and instructor at the University of Rhode Island where they are studying the creative and critical roles that Hauntology and Intersectional Ecology take on within Postcolonial American Literature. 

Tucker Haddock (they/them/theirs)

Graduate Student

Tucker Haddock is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the English department. Their research interests include discard studies, Black studies, and critical STS. Their current work looks at American speculative fiction as a site for the formation of logics of disposability.

Virginia Jansen (she/her/hers)

Graduate Student

Virginia Jansen is a PhD student in Musicology at UC Davis. Her primary research interests focus on the influence of vernacular music on American classical music in the 19th and 20th centuries. In her work, she aims to explore questions of identity, intertextuality, and revival.