Rhiannon Clarke
Rhiannon Clarke is a PhD student in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Her research interests include Southern Cone literature, Hispano-Filipino studies, and trauma and memory studies across visual media, particularly film and graphic narrative. Prior to Hopkins, she won a Fulbright award to Argentina and spent two years in the Peace Corps in Indonesia. She earned her BA in Spanish, with honors, and Philosophy, manga cum laude, from Whitman College, where she also won a Louis B. Perry Summer Research Award to research Spanish graphic narrative.
Lila Fabro
Lila Fabro is a PhD student in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Her research centers on the intersections between Yiddish and Spanish in Argentine literature. She is particularly interested in the bilingual Yiddish-Spanish publications in Argentina, and in the emergence of postvernacular Yiddish in the works of Argentine contemporary authors. She earned her BA in Art History with an emphasis on Musicology from the University of Buenos Aires. Prior to Hopkins, she worked at the Research Area on Performing Arts and Jewishness at the Institute of Performing Arts “Dr. Raúl H. Castagnino” based in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, University of Buenos Aires.
Bruno Franco Medeiros
Bruno Franco Medeiros is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. His current research revolves around the uneven, nonetheless connected, stories of humans and nonhuman entities across the Americas as they appear through the lens of queer experiences that are represented in a myriad of forms, with a focus on their literary, audiovisual, and pharmacological manifestations. He earned his BA in History from Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Brazil, and his MA and Ph.D. in Social History from Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. As a historian, his research and publications examined the emergence of national historiographies and the modern experience of time in the nineteenth-century European and Lusophone worlds.
Hans Frex
Hans Frex’s research interests revolve around ecocriticism, border literature, and racialized immigration with
a special focus on the community care practices that contest the State exclusion and persecution policies. I have participated in several international conferences and published papers in Aithesis, Revista de Teoría
del Arte and elsewere. I was the editor of Voces en movimiento (Cuarto Propio, 2022), a book that contains sixteen testimonies of immigrant women living in Chile, including the testimony of Elizabeth Andrade Huaringa, who received the National Human Rights Award in 2022. Next year I am publishing my first book, Rompiendo Barreras. Geohistorias del Macrocampamento Los Arenales (Pampa Negra) that tells the oral history of Los Arenales, an informal settlement that fights for the right to the city and the right to
migrate.
David Patterson
David Patterson is a PhD student in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. His research interests include 20th- and 21st-century Southern Cone literature, migration, and human rights. He is also interested in how texts engage with philosophical notions of existence and what implications this has on ethics and social justice. Prior to Hopkins, he completed an MA in Spanish at Baylor University, where he wrote a thesis on Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez, and Cristina Peri Rossi and the presence of human rights in their narratives.
Francisco Pérez Marsilla
Francisco Pérez Marsilla is a PhD student in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and the Graduate Assistant for the Center for Africana Studies. His current research looks at the interplay of race, origins, diaspora, and literature in the Caribbean, paying special attention to its relationship with the U.S. His articles have appeared in Variaciones Borges, Aula Lírica, and elsewhere. Prior to Hopkins, he received an MA from Yale University, an MA from Northern Illinois University, and a BA from the University of Navarra. In 2019, he received a Sydney Mintz Student Fellowship for Field Research.
Alicia Piñar Diaz
Alicia Piñar Diaz is a PhD student in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Her research centers on the intersections of literature and culture studies, with a focus on the deconstruction of the stereotypes and principles that represent the art world. Specifically, those that undervalue or elide expressions of otherness and relegate them to a subjugated space. She is particularly interested in exchanges between different cultures, aiming to theorize a historiographical and critical framework for studying works by marginalized groups. Prior to Hopkins, she received a BA in Art History from the University of Granada. She also earned an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Granada and an MA in Spanish Literature from the University of Delaware. udies program, with honors, from Wesleyan University, where she was also awarded the Kevin Echart Memorial Book Prize.
Verónica Ríos Saavedra
Verónica Ríos Saavedra is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. She graduated from the Universidad de Lima, where she focused on the audiovisual representation of the Peruvian Amazon and its population on audiovisual media and press, as well as working in the production of several short-films. Prior to Hopkins, she worked at the Institute for Scientific Research at the Universidad de Lima and in the Audiovisual Department of the Ministry of Culture (Peru). During those three years she could work in close contact with filmmakers, film researchers, and cultural agents from all over the country, which allowed her to gain a broad perspective of the contemporary filmographic landscape in Peru.
For the last five years, she has been a part of the production team of MUTA, an international film festival devoted to audiovisual appropriation and which showcases productions made from found footage and previously existing materials. Through the festival, they were able to have guest filmmakers and researchers from Spain, Canada, the USA, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Mexico in Peru. In 2020 she co-founded Cine Íntimo, a project that aims at rescuing and digitizing Peruvian familiar archives in Super8, 8mm, and 16mm formats so that they can be shared and seen, in the hopes of contributing to a more honest and cohesive sense of national identity.
Mariangela Ugarelli Risi
Mariangela Ugarelli Risi is a PhD student and research assistant at the Johns Hopkins University in the Spanish section. She has a Licenciatura in Hispanic Literature by the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Her study field encompasses Latin American gothic, fantastic and horror literature from a narratological perspective, as well the intersection of these genres with with humour. The fantastic played a focal role in her thesis about Argentine writer Leopoldo Lugones entitled, “La Palabra Secreta: Cuentos Fatales como alegoría literaria del mito del eterno retorno para el funcionamiento de los fantástico”. She has participated in multiple congresses in Perú and the US, most of which focused on the Franco-uruguayan masterpiece Les Chants de Maldoror. Her publications both as an academic and as a short story writer have appeared in several anthologies and other printed media. As an artist, she has illustrated magazine covers and centerfolds and has also exhibited her works in her home country, Perú.
Ignacio Veraguas
Ignacio Veraguas is a PhD student in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. His research focuses on Latin American thought and the representation of Latin America. Specifically, his work aims to explore the conjunction between descriptions of nature and definitions of Latin American being, with a historical and philosophical insight. Prior to Johns Hopkins University he received a BA in Hispanic Literature and Linguistics and an BA in Aesthetics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (UC). He also earned a MA in Art History and Theory from the University of Chile (UCH).
Alfredo Walls
Alfredo Walls earned a BA in Philosophy from Universidad Panamericana, Mexico City, and an MA in Comparative Literature from King’s College, London. His research work is oriented towards the intersection of philosophical thought and literary discourse, with a special focus on the tragic and the twentieth century Latin American (neo)baroque. His current research examines how the literary neobaroque displays a deep break with homogeneous notions of modernity, meaning and identity through linguistic devices of allegorical nature. Prior to his arrival at Hopkins, Alfredo worked as guest lecturer at several universities in his natal Puebla, Mexico, where he taught various undergraduate level courses on Philosophy and Literature.
Rachel Williams
Rachel Williams is a PhD student in the department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Her research centers on Golden Age Spanish literature, with a focus on gender, sexuality, love, and sanity. She is particularly interested in gendered representations of lovesickness and its effects on male and female subjects. Prior to Hopkins, she earned her BA in the College of Letters, with high honors, and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, with honors, from Wesleyan University, where she was also awarded the Kevin Echart Memorial Book Prize.