PhD Student Profiles
César Iván Alvarez-Ibarra
César is from the city of Monterrey. He received a bachelor’s degree in International Studies from the Universidad de Monterrey (UDEM) in 2016 and an MA in Latin American Studies from UT Austin in 2020. Both his college and MA degrees have focused on LGBTT+ resistances to LGBTT+ mainstream hegemony. From 2015 to 2016, César was able to collaborate with different organizations such as Fuerzas Unidas por Nuestros Desaparecidos en Nuevo León (FUNDENL) and CREDS (Centro de Representación y Diversidad Sexual). From 2016 to 2018, he worked as a high school teacher for the social sciences department at UDEM Unidad Fundadores High School.
César is interested in the possibilities for cuir radical futurity-building via performance art, and LGBTT+/cuir rejection and dissidence to narratives of hegemonic LGBTT+ citizenship, respectability, and homonationalism.
Research Interests: Performance studies; art; maricón resistance; travesti dissidence; Ballroom scene; Monterrey; Nicaragua; homonationalism; filth; hygiene; hegemony; cuir anarcho-communism
Cindia Arango López
Cindia Arango López holds a bachelor's in History from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellín and a master's in Geography from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá with a specialization in environment and cartography at the University of Antioquia. She has focused her research on colonial history and contemporary human geography. She has also worked in the public sector in Colombia, such as the National Museum of Colombia, the Historical Memory Center, and the Ministry of Culture. From 2016 to 2021, she worked as an academic coordinator, professor, and researcher in Colombia's only undergraduate program in Desarrollo Territorial, offered by the University of Antioquia for the regions. In her first book, Geografías de la movilidad. Perspectivas desde Colombia (2016), she and co-author Luis Sánchez Ayala consider new routes to resignifying forced mobility and drawing alternative voluntary mobilities. Cindia has also published articles related to slavery in Colombia, historical cartography, and socio-environmental conflicts in Latin America.
Her doctoral research seeks to establish a connection between the Magdalena River and its navigators, the enslaved population, and mixed-race people ("mulatos") known as bogas in 18th-century Colombia (the New Kingdom of Granada).
Research Interests: Environmental history; human geography; identity and race; slavery studies; transatlantic history; environment; and territorial studies.
Ana Carolina Assumpção
A journalist born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Ana Carolina received a bachelor’s in Social Communication in Rio de Janeiro and an MA in Latin American Studies from UT Austin in 2021. She has always been connected with social movements. Before moving to Austin in 2019, she was the curator and producer of a project that transformed a public-school patio into a graffiti art gallery. As the mother of young of a girl, she seeks social justice changes and works to reduce racial and gender inequalities. Her master's research focused on community collectives and Black women's organizations in Rio’s favelas and how they resist police brutality and state anti-blackness policies. She will continue her research in the LLILAS doctoral program, focusing on Black women as political subjects and their favelas organizations.
Research Interests: Territory; Black women; necropolitics; resistance politics; Rio de Janeiro; social movements
Ana Luiza Biazeto
Ana Luiza Biazeto has a bachelor's degree in Communication/Journalism and a master's degree in Social Work. She worked as a journalist on racial issues and, during her master's degree, researched the reality of women imprisoned for drug trafficking in a prison complex in São Paulo, Brazil, the city where she was born and raised. Since finishing her master's degree in 2010, she has worked as an educator, coordinator, and mediator of nonprofit socio-educational projects serving mostly Black youth, with the intention of having an impact on youth outside the prison system, helping to break the school-to-prison pipeline. As a next academic step, she intends to deepen and improve her thesis, to study mass incarceration of Black women in Brazil, and to investigate cases of adolescents living in youth centers.
Research Interests: Mass incarceration; race; gender; intersectionality; youth; necropolitics
Charlene Bicalho
Charlene Bicalho is a visual artist, curator, and educator whose work in experimental video, performance, installation, photography and text emerges from the intersection between institutional critique, reflections on the legacy of traditional communities, networked processes and non-hegemonic learning. She holds a degree in Administration from the Federal University of Espírito Santo. As an independent artist, she has participated in exhibitions, taught courses, given workshops and lectures, and provided training activities in Argentina, Germany, Brazil, the United States, Peru, and Uruguay. Her works in public and private collections include LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections (University of Texas at Austin), Art Galleries at Black Studies (University of Texas at Austin), VídeoBrasil, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Instituto Campo Garzón, and Galeria Espaço Universitário (University of the State of Espírito Santo). Bicalho is interested in the possibilities for expanding the repertoire of images, knowledge, and cultural practices carried out by Black artists in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Research Interests: Black and transatlantic studies; culture studies; intersectionality; archives; Black feminism; aesthetics; art; decolonizing methodologies
Denise Braz
Denise is from Minas Gerais, Brazil. She is a Black feminist, progressive, comunista, singer, and activist for human rights and nature. She completed her bachelor’s degree in literature in Brazil, where she was also a teacher. She lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for seven years, where she pursued a master’s in social anthropology in the Department of Philosophy and Literature at the University of the Buenos Aires. Her thesis was titled "The Black Social Movement of the City of Buenos Aires: Practices and Claims.” In Buenos Aires, Denise investigated Black history from the stories and perspectives of the Black people themselves, while also considering her own experience in the double role of researcher and activist. She began her doctoral studies at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, in August 2020. Her work will focus on the struggles of Black mothers in defense of their lives and the lives of their families.
Research Interests: Race; gender; intersectionality; decolonialism; Black social movements; Black feminism
Huiying Cui
Huiying was born and raised in China. She completed her BA in Spanish at Sun Yat-sen University and studied at Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, as an exchange student. She worked as an interpreter in the 12th China–Latin America and the Caribbean Business Summit in 2018. In 2022, she received her master’s degree in Latin American Studies at Tulane University, New Orleans. After graduation, she worked for Bard Early College, New Orleans, as a faculty member in the Languages and Humanities Department. She also participated in the ESL program in the Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans working for migrant communities in New Orleans. Her doctoral research seeks to understand the changing power dynamics in societies affected by ongoing infrastructure projects invested by Chinese actors, specifically on women.
Research Interests: Gender relations and organizations, Indigenous activism, infrastructure development, rural and urban feminism, environmental impact assessment, the Amazon, and Guatemala/Honduras
Luísa Bridi Dacroce
Luísa Dacroce is broadly interested in experiences of ethnoracial identity navigation, contestation, and negotiation, as well as these processes' implications for panethnic solidarity and identity politics. Her work has explored how children of Brazilian immigrants navigate U.S. ethnoracial dynamics and negotiate their non-Hispanic Latinidad. She hopes to continue studying the experiences of the Brazilian diaspora in the United States, as well as how those experiences resemble or differ from those of their Hispanic counterparts. Similarly, she plans to explore the dynamics of contemporary Brazilian and Hispanic relations in this country.
Research Interests: Identity politics, intersectionality, intraethnic relations, Brazilian immigrants and diaspora in the U.S.
Mariana Escalona
Mariana Escalona was born and raised in La Habana, Cuba. She completed a bachelor’s degree in Sociology at the Universidad de La Habana and a master’s degree in Business Administration with a major in Human Resources in the University Ana G Méndez, Puerto Rico. She is mainly interested in gender, Black and transatlantic studies.
Research Interests: Gender, Black and transatlantic studies; History of empire, law and labor division in the Caribbean, colonialism and neocolonial practices
Alex Costa Kott
Alex Costa Kott holds a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Texas State University and a master’s degree from the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) at the University of Texas at Austin. During his master’s program, Alex’s research looked at religious intolerance and Umbanda’s relationship with the environment. For his doctorate, Alex is investigating Umbanda’s place in broader discussions of racial dynamics in terreiros and Brazilian society. Alex’s interests are motivated by living in Goiânia, Brazil, and in the Brazilian diaspora in the U.S.
Research Interests: Africana religions, Umbanda, Bantu origins, Afro-Brazilian epistemologies, indigeneities, Eurocentrism, Popular Catholicism, spiritual ecology, religious music
Gustavo Fuchs Alvarado
Gustavo received a bachelor's degree in International Studies from the National University of Costa Rica (UNA), an MA in Media Studies from FLACSO Ecuador, and an LLM in International Law from the University of Nottingham. His studies have focused on media and human rights, including topics such as media ownership, agenda-setting, and hate speech. Since 2018 he has been investigating the intersection between media, religion, and politics, focusing on the evangelical movement in Costa Rica and its rise into mainstream politics after that year’s presidential elections.
Research Interests: Media studies; evangelical movement; religious politics; far right; Central America agenda-setting; framing; democracy; human rights
Paula Lezama
Paula Lezama, holds a BA in Economics from her home country, Colombia, and an MA degree in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean at the University of South Florida, where she worked for over 10 years and is part of their Afro-descendants Working Group. She is interested in a wide range of topics related to racial disparities in Colombia and Brazil, including the multidimensional poverty measures for Afro-descendants and the impact of armed conflict and violence.
Research Interests: Historical, discursive, and material connection between Blackness, poverty and Homo economicus; historical specificities of poverty in Latin America; the Western Hemisphere; global poverty as a distinctly "colored" phenomenon
Ana López Hurtado
Ana López Hurtado (she/they) is a Colombian poet and researcher. She holds a master’s degree in European, Latin American, and Comparative Literatures and Cultures from The University of Cambridge; a graduate certificate in Epistemologies of the South from The Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO); and a BA in Literary Studies from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. Her doctoral research focuses on the affective and emotional dimensions of paid domestic work in Colombia from a decolonial feminist perspective.
Ana's first poetry book, Aquí donde tiemblo, was published in 2021 by Sincronía Casa Editorial. She is also part of Como la Flor, an anthology of Colombian cuir (queer) contemporary poetry published by Editorial Planeta; and Cielo Desnudo, a digital compilation of contemporary Latin American poetry. Her work appears in publications such as Río Grande Review, Círculo de poesía, El Hipogrifo, and Portal magazine, among others.
Research Interests: Theories of Affect and Emotion; Care Studies; Care Economies; Reproductive Labor; Paid Domestic Work in Colombia and Latin America; Sociology of Work and Employment in Colombia and Latin America; Sociology of Emotions; Decolonial Theories and Methodologies; Decolonial Feminisms; Global South Epistemologies; Gender Studies; Feminist Geographies; Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies; Buddhist Epistemologies; Oral Histories
Imelda Muñoz
Imelda Muñoz is born and raised in Salinas, California, and is the daughter of Mexican immigrant parents. She holds an MA in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University and received a BA in Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies from California State University Monterey Bay. Her doctoral research focuses on the life experiences of queer and transgender Mexican immigrants who work in the agricultural industry in central California. Using an ethnographic approach, Muñoz examines the social lives of queer and transgender Mexican immigrants within multiple contexts: (1) the agricultural industry, both in the fields and produce-packing factories; (2) the rural communities of the Salinas Valley; and, (3) their family and kinship ties.
Research interests: Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies; Women and Gender Studies; Sexuality Studies; Ethnic Studies; Migration Studies; Third World Feminism
Katherin Patricia Tairo-Quispe
Katherin Tairo is a Quechua scholar and activist who was born and grew up in Sicuani, a small town of Cusco in the south of Peru. She holds a master's degree in Social Management from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, a master's degree in Social Business Management for Social Innovation and Local Development from Universidad EAFIT Colombia, and a bachelor's degree in Social Communication from Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco.
Aside from her PhD, she is currently running socially engaged projects in the Peruvian Andes (Cusco and Apurimac regions) with Quechua communities and the support of local governments, and the United States Embassy in Peru. Her experience (which she calls “adventures”) as a researcher and consultant for nonprofit organizations motivate her to explore “development” from an indigenous approach. Particularly, the role of indigenous policies in “developmental” programs and projects in Peru and Latin America, with emphasis on those that are being implemented in indigenous communities.
Research Interests: Indigenous studies; decolonizing methodologies; indigenous politics; development from an indigenous approach; aesthetics; Quechua media activism; gender studies
Juan Tiney Chirix
Juan is a Tzutujil-Kakchiquel Mayan non-binary student who grew up in a country called Guatemala. Before starting their doctoral studies at UT Austin, Juan received a bachelor’s degree in economics at the University of Havana and dual master’s degree in Latin American Studies / Community and Regional Planning, which expanded their knowledge of the officially recognized Indigenous literature in academia, both in Latin America and in the United States. The struggle for recognition and respect for Indigenous nations is a family legacy. Juan has also been involved in reclaiming academic spaces for the recognition of Indigenous knowledge, especially the indigenous economy and politics. Juan’s master’s thesis, titled “El cooperativismo como espacio político y económico para el empoderamiento de las mujeres negras e indígenas: diálogos intersectoriales sur-sur (La República Dominicana y Guatemala),” centered on the recognition of the knowledge of women of color, especially Indigenous and Black women, in microprojects of permaculture; however, Juan analyzes research methodologies and positionality as a non-binary Indigenous researcher.
Research Interests: Indigenous studies in Guatemala; critical race and gender theory; political economics; cooperativism and neoliberalism; decolonization of planning; participatory methodology
