Culture and Theory Students

Elaine Kathryn Andres
Email: ekandres@uci.edu

Elaine's research interests include popular music and visual culture, transnational feminist practices, gender & sexuality studies, sexual health education, Asian American studies, Filipino/a American studies, and narrative and performance as praxis. 

Jocelyn Burrell
Email: jaburrel@uci.edu

Jocelyn’s research mobilizes questions raised by the end of race and other ostensibly intractable systems of cultural, political, and psychic organization. She is primarily concerned with the psychic and affective pedagogies instrumentalized, both consciously and unconsciously, in the construction and regeneration of violent human sorting systems, and the counter-pedagogies developed across various modalities that together might form a teachable ethos of resistance and social transformation. The speculative method of her work draws from both creative and theoretical frameworks, including playwriting and performance studies, affect theory, black feminist thought, gender and sexuality studies, critical theory, and media studies. A former editor and publisher, Jocelyn earned a BA in Ethnic Studies at Brown University.

LaShonda Carter
Email: lrcarter@uci.edu

LaShonda’s research is concerned with manifestations and the accrual of violence against black bodies as a result of institutional and systemic anti-black racism. She also researches the different modes of personal and political survival they develop in an attempt to respond to living in conditions of continuous incredible violence.  She holds a BA in African American Studies and in English from the University of California at Irvine.

Roy Cherian
Email: rcherian@uci.edu

Roy Cherian's research traces the emergence of race and the biomedical with regard to the historico-material and psycho-political dimensions of colonialization and enslavement. More precisely, by interrogating the relationship between anti-blackness and the secular, Roy's research poses the question of how Black flesh functions as an essential site for the production and refinement of knowledge and the praxis critical to the functioning of biopolitical states and the self-fashioning of its secular citizens and subjects.

Erica Cheung
Email: ericamc1@uci.edu

Erica's interdisciplinary research explores the intersections of food as a racialized and gendered text, identity formation, critical landscapes, and cyberspace. As such, her current research looks at the discursive construction of Asian American racialized and hypermasculine identities within the popular culinary industry and narratives about food, eating, and cooking. Her larger project is interested in analyzing the production and consumption of food as performative self-making within the “global city” of Los Angeles.

DeShawn Dumas
Email: dldumas@uci.edu

DeShawn's research centers whiteness as a militarized socio-economic order and psychodermatological frame for constructions of personhood and subjective experience. His interests include aesthetics, political ontology, climate ecology and the future of policing. 
 
A contemporary conceptual painter and Visiting Faculty at San Francisco Art Institute, He received a Master of Arts degree in Fine Art and the History of Art and Design from the Pratt Institute.  

Chasia Elzina Jeffries
Email: cejeffri@uci.edu

Chasia is a Ph.D. student in the Culture & Theory Program at UC Irvine. Her research prioritizes the narratives and perspectives of Black women in the contexts of resistance, irrationality, truth, and community building/kinship. She historicizes the everyday resistance of Black women, using storytelling, memory, literature, poetry, emotions, and the body as archives to produce counter-histories while critiquing and developing theoretical arguments. She is particularly interested in the historical and contemporary relationship between irrationality and Black femininity and seeks to emphasize race in current conversations in crip and affect theory. Her passion for advocacy, especially legal advocacy, allows her to investigate ideas of credibility, bodily autonomy, ability, gender, and race in relation to legal issues, such as reproductive rights, gender-based violence, and environmental racism.

Chasia received her B.A. in Law, History, & Culture with a minor in Gender & Social Justice from the University of Southern California where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow.

Samiha Khalil
Email: sskhalil@uci.edu

Samiha's research examines racial slavery in the Arab world, Arab subject-formation and its convergences with constructions of race. This work employs critical race theory, black studies, philosophy, postcolonial theory, and textual analysis of historical Arabic texts. It aims to create new methodological approaches to studying the transmutations of racial regimes in the Arab World and on a global scale. Samiha’s formal training in architecture and critical geography informs her other research interests, which extend to the intersections of architecture and psychoanalysis, space/body relations in colonial cities, and her previous work on racialized urban governance and its spatial manifestations in urban settings.

Ronnese Kirton Glover
Email: rkirtong@uci.edu

Ronnese’s research concerns the long-lasting consequences of chattel slavery literacy laws and the ways in which they materialize in contemporary composition pedagogy. More specifically, her work draws critical attention to how academic language norms disadvantage Blacks students and Black vernacular knowledge, contributing to anti-Blackness in the classroom. This work employs composition theory and pedagogy, critical race theory, Black studies, literature and culture, and critical university studies. Engaging theories of racial passing, decolonization, and critical pedagogy, Ronnese’s work aims to project alternatives to anti-Blackness in educational spaces. She holds a BA and MA in Literature from California State University, Los Angeles.

Taija McDougall
Email: tmcdouga@uci.edu

Taija’s research positions the question of time in relation to both finance capitalism and blackness. Through readings of Black autobiography, Black Critical Theory, psychoanalysis and political economy, her work considers the role of time-telling, time-keeping, clockwork, and financial instruments as a means and method of grasping the tenses and times of Blackness, the Black being, and temporality. Her work has appeared in liquid blackness, Anthurium, and Décalages.

Mariel Rowland
Email: mariel.rowland@uci.edu

Mariel’s research centers radical Black womxn educators. She studies the lives and pedagogical work of womxn who have made space in educational systems where there seemingly was none. Tracing their different methods of rupture, Mariel considers the ways in which Black feminist pedagogy moves across time and space, and in between people. With a background in art museum education, Mariel’s own practice as an educator informs her research.

Brie Smiley
Email: smileyb@uci.edu

Brie’s research seeks provocations to the questions of ontology, madness, and deviance. Using psychoanalysis, Black Critical Theory, memoir, and Black queer theory, Brie’s work constantly seeks to use slavery as a theoretic for the past, present and future of Black positionality in the world. Brie is also interested in the fallacies of multiculturalism, reform, and representation and their wider connections to antiblackness. Additionally, Brie seeks to research Brazilian archives and American archives of slavery and law, as well as the stratification of Blackness between the United States and Latin America. They received their Master’s in Women’s Studies and Bachelor’s in African American Studies from the University of Alabama.

Isabelle Williams
Email: icwilli1@uci.edu

Isabelle's research repositions the blackface minstrel as an active and present monster. Her work is concerned with how the body is formed and reformed especially through play in horror video games.  Using psychoanalysis, political economy, Black Critical Theory, film theory, and phenomenology as her framework, her research questions the status of the body, specifically the black body, within categories of family friendly entertainment. She received her Master's in Film and Media Studies from Chapman University.