Diana Higuera Cortes is a PhD student in the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures (LAILaC) program at the Graduate Center-CUNY. She received her B.A. in Language Teaching from Universidad Pedagógica Nacional in Bogotá and her MA in Spanish and Latin American and Caribbean Studies from St. John’s University. Her current work focuses on Latina Domestic Workers in the Metropolitan Area of New York City as they commodify their language practices in the frame of the Care Economy. She’s interested in Language Ideologies, LatinX Studies, Migration, Spanish as a Heritage Language and critical approaches to language learning and teaching. She is currently an Adjunct Faculty at Lehman College and Hunter College, CUNY, and she is also a fellow at the Workers Justice Project in partnership with the LatinX Project from NYU.

Chris standing in a street Chris Colón is a visual artist, and scholar-activist from Brooklyn, NY. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Urban Education program at the Graduate Center. He uses auto-ethnographic, arts-based research to help us rethink what education is and how to make sense of the world around us.

Sasha Isaac is a third-year doctoral student in the sociology program. Their research has largely focused on gender and reproductive justice, with a more recent interest in radical political movements in the South Asian context. This reflects a broader commitment to the decolonization of research and of education, which is what ultimately drew them to the Humanities Alliance program. As a Humanities Alliance Fellow, Sasha aims to support the development of teaching methods and resources that break from traditional educational practices, particularly with an emphasis on student-centered learning and alternative modes of knowledge acquisition/understanding.

Sukie Kim headshot

Sukie Kim (she/they) is a Korean American born in Illinois and raised in Bundang, South Korea. Currently they live in Queens, New York, where they are a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center’s English program. Their PhD thinks through speculative fiction’s capacity to analyze and critique imaginations of the future framed by heteronormativity, neoliberalism, racial capitalism, and US imperialism in Asia. Recently, they translated Cho Yeop Kim’s short story “Laura.”

Cary Fitzgerald is a PhD student in English at the Graduate Center. They teach American Literature at Hunter College. As a Humanities Alliance fellow, Cary will be joining Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Mellisa wearing a black shirt and glasses standing at GC hallway

Melisa Martinez Ascanio is a fourth-year Graduate student in the LAILaC doctoral program. She has worked as a Spanish instructor in Philadelphia, Bronx, and Queens. Her academic interests include Evil and its representation in Latin American literature and cinema, as well as the Philosophy of Literature and Animal Studies. She is currently working on her dissertation proposal and learning how to cook.

Michelle smiling wearing a greenish sweater

Michelle Rendón Ochoa (she, her, ella), a first-generation Colombian-American educator, is pursuing a PhD in Urban Education at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Over the span of a decade, she taught English and Spanish, working with BIPOC youth in Medellín, Colombia and Freeport, Long Island. Her research interests encompass community-based research, school abolition and the co-creation of digital archives in the classroom that center historically marginalized communities. She is specifically interested in preserving and retelling the stories of the Latinx community in suburban Long Island and incorporating them in curricula. As a Humanities Alliance fellow, she will be working with LaGuardia Community College.

Natalia wearing a green dress and glasses

Natalia Villarroel Torres (she/her/ella) is a Ph.D. student in the Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures Program at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She received her B.A. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures, and her M.A. in Hispanic Linguistics from Universidad de Chile between 2015 and 2018. In 2019 Natalia completed a certificate in Higher Education and Didactics at Universidad Central de Chile, the same place in which he taught courses related to education, language, and literacy from sociolinguistic approaches.

Natalia is currently teaching Spanish for heritage speakers at Hunter and Lehman College (CUNY), while developing a research line related to her main interests in historical sociolinguistics, archive studies, feminism, and social movements.

Additionally, Natalia is an active member of “Indisciplinadxs” a Feminist Linguistic Circle in which she develops, along with other members, different ways of activism that aim to broaden linguistic studies from feminist perspectives. An example of this is the project “Spanish Feminist Linguistics Archive: Language, Gender, and the Voices of Latinx and Latin American Women”, which seeks to build a digital linguistic repository and contribute to Open Access Resources for education. As a Humanities Alliance fellow, Natalia is working with LaGuardia Community College in the borough of Queens.