PhD Student Profiles
Mauro Aguirre
Mauro Aguirre is originally from El Colorado, Formosa, Argentina, in the territory of the Gran Chaco Walamba. He holds a BA in Social Communication with a specialization in Research from the National University of Córdoba (Argentina), where his undergraduate thesis examined the transformations of telework during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is the first graduate of the Master’s Program in Digital Humanities at the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF), where he received Honorable Mention for his thesis on the ethical and technical challenges of handling sensitive data in the digital archive of the Juicios por la Verdad (Truth Trials) in Argentina.
His research focuses on the intersections of technology, human rights, and digital archives in Latin America, with particular attention to data governance, memory practices, and the ethical implications of digital infrastructures in the region. He currently serves as a lecturer in the same graduate program at UNTREF, teaching the course “Heritage and GLAM Perspectives,” where he engages with critical approaches to digital archives, cultural heritage, and memory institutions.
His work has been recognized with several academic distinctions and awards, including the LLILAS Benson Fellowship for Digital Scholarship and the AVAnnotate Research Fellowship, through which he has worked with audiovisual memory materials related to the Argentine dictatorship. His current research engages with the audiovisual corpus of documentary filmmaker Raymundo Gleyzer. He is a board member of the Archives, Libraries, and Digital Scholarship section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), where he has presented his work in both panels and workshops.
Mauro is also the Chair of the ILASSA Conference, the longest-running conference on Latin American Studies in the United States. He participates in multiple research groups, including internet studies initiatives at the National University of Córdoba and the DigiSur research group at UT Austin, where he contributes to ongoing discussions on digitality, power, and technological infrastructures in the Global Majority.
Research Interests: Digital archives, tech policy, human rights
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
Júlia Briet
Júlia Briet is from Pindamonhangaba, São Paulo, Brazil. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Architecture and Urban Planning from the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, where she also completed an academic exchange at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina. She earned a master’s degree in Urbanism from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and has taught architecture as a lecturer at the Instituto Federal de São Paulo, Campos do Jordão campus.
Her work is grounded in a people-centered understanding of architecture and urbanism. Throughout her academic and professional trajectory, Júlia has been interested in how people experience, appropriate, transform, and create meaning in urban spaces. Her previous research explored public spaces in heritage contexts, urban mobility, urban design, and the relationships between traditional festivities and the collective appropriation of cities.
In her PhD research, she investigates Latin American migration, refugees, placemaking, and the right to the city. She is especially interested in how migrants build community, belonging, and everyday forms of participation through public space. Her research seeks to connect spatial analysis with people’s lived experiences, stories, and rights in the city.
Research Interests: Right to the city, Latin American migration, public spaces, and placemaking
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 holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Columbia University and a master’s in Latin American Studies with a specialization in Migration and Transnational Studies from the University of Florida. As a PhD student, she is also pursuing a Graduate Portfolio in Social and Cultural Analysis and a Traineeship in Demography from the Population Research Center. Her research interests center on the demographic impact of migration across the Americas.
Research Interests: Demography, Transnational Studies, Inter- and Intragroup Relations
Mariana Escalona
Mariana Escalona was born and raised in Havana, Cuba. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from the University of Havana and an MBA in Human Resources Administration from Ana G. Méndez University in Puerto Rico. Her interdisciplinary training includes graduate portfolios in African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. Her research examines the relationship between state power, the organization of labor, and citizenship, with particular attention to how institutions structure access to rights and recognition and how individuals and communities negotiate political belonging. Her qualitative approach combines archival research with the interpretation of testimony, cultural narratives, and material objects to investigate how institutional authority is exercised, experienced, and contested.
Drawing on judicial and notarial records, her doctoral research examines how enslaved and free Black women in nineteenth-century Cuba engaged legal institutions, labor arrangements, and kinship networks to negotiate the possibilities and limits of autonomy under slavery. Integrating legal history, Black feminist thought, and cultural studies, the project investigates how racialized legal status shaped—and was negotiated through—everyday relations of labor, kinship, and care.
Research Interests: Caribbean and African diaspora studies; state power, labor, and citizenship; slavery and colonial law; Black feminist thought; qualitative methodologies and archival studies; material culture; testimony and memory; migration and belonging
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
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
María Jimena López León
Maria Jimena is originally from Cali but has lived and worked most of her life in Bogotá, Colombia. She is an anthropologist from the National University of Colombia, where she also earned a master's degree in Political Studies, and holds a Master of Science in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has previously researched how gender and ethnicity have shaped patterns of violence perpetrated by armed actors, as well as processes of identity re-signification and social mobilization in the context of the Colombian armed conflict. She has also worked for more than a decade on rural development and peacebuilding programs in Colombia.
Her current research interests focus on how communities in rural Colombia navigate survival strategies amid economic, environmental, and social uncertainty, and how these strategies challenge conventional distinctions between illegality, informality, and illicitness. Her work brings together anthropology, economic sociology, and public policy to examine the political economy of peacebuilding.
Research Interests: Illegal economies; informality, urban-rural divide, political economy of peacebuilding
Tiago Li
Tiago Li is from Wuhan, China. He received both a bachelor’s degree in Portuguese and a master’s in History from Peking University. Deeply engaged with Brazil, he has visited the country several times and studied as an exchange student at Unicamp in 2023. He has translated multiple Portuguese works into Chinese, including short stories, essays, and two widely read books: 1808 by Laurentino Gomes and Lula: Biografia by Fernando Morais. His doctoral research seeks to bring together historical and anthropological perspectives to examine how Brazil’s subaltern soybean farmers responded to capital expansion, engaged with state policies, and sustained their relationship with the environment. Through fieldwork on oral histories, he aims to highlight rural voices often excluded from official accounts, while situating Brazil’s soybean economy within broader global dynamics.
Research interests: Brazilian political and social history; agricultural development; Portuguese language and literature
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