2020-21 IUPLR/UIC Mellon Fellows

Dr. Óscar Daniel Campo Becerra is an Assistant Professor at Universidad del Norte (Barranquilla, Colombia). Prior to joining this university, he was an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the Universidad Central (Bogotá, Colombia). He received his Ph.D from the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies at University of Illinois Chicago. He also completed a M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where he also completed a B.A. degree in Literary Studies. He has published a short story collection (Los aplausos, 2014) and a novel (Días hábiles, 2021). He worked as a co-writer, researcher, and editor in two historical memory projects in Colombia: Vidas de historia. Una memoria literaria de la Organización Femenina Popular (2015) and Uprooting Narratives: A Memoir of Violent Displacements, Floridablanca-Santander (2019). Dr. Campo’s research interests are in Latin American Studies with emphasis on questions memory and writing in Colombia. Currently, his research focuses on the memory process that takes place in Barrancabermeja’s Paseo del Río, a cultural corridor of traditional food along the Magdalena River. His dissertation, titled “Unfinished Novels / Unfinished Communities in Transnational Latin America,” examines a set of Latin American novels from the last decades of the twentieth century that strategically interrupt, avoid, or block narrative closure. Rather than the totalizing Boom novel, the formal “failure” of the unfinished novels makes visible the entanglement between violence and history in a Latin America that has not shed its postcolonial legacies. He is also co-founder and editor in the independent publishing house, Himpar Editores.

Óscar Daniel Campo Becerra’s faculty mentor: Dr. Christina Soto van der Plas, Department of Hispanic Studies, University of Califonia, Riverside.

Dr. Allison Guess is a Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University and the incoming Iris W. Davis Endowed Chair Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Bowdoin College. Previously Guess was an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College. In 2021, Guess was a CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Research Fellow in Harlem, NY. She earned a Ph.D. in Earth and Environmental Sciences (Human Geography) at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Named a “rising Latino studies scholar,” in 2020, Guess is a former IUPLR Fellow (Inter-University Program for Latino Research) funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Guess’ forthcoming manuscript titled, Plotting on the Plot in Hispaniola: The 1521 Christmas Rebellion as a 16th century (Dis)continuous Black Land Story and the Insistent Unsettling Crisis of the New World, explains and defines Black people’s specific relationships to land in the Americas by further developing the category “Black Land” through the crucial study of late 15th and 16th century Hispaniola. Guess has carried out her archival research on the 1521 Christmas Rebellion and Black rebel life in late 15th and 16th century Hispaniola, since 2016 while the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute hosted her. As a lifelong theorist and practitioner of Black Land, Guess took up the formal study of the phenomena starting in 2010 as an undergraduate student at the University of Pittsburgh. Her published scholarly work can be found in Women’s Studies Quarterly (2021), Deterritorializing/Reterritorializing: Critical Geography of Educational Reform (2017), American Quarterly (2016), Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society (2014), and Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (2014). Guess is currently working on several book projects, in addition to the manuscript mentioned above, the other is provisionally titled, Mama Tingó: Rebel Land Defender. Guess is also at work on another project conditionally titled, Catching a Case of Freedom: Places, Practices, and Possibilities of Black Revolt in 16th-17th Century Hispaniola. These two projects pinpoint instances of freedom, struggle, and resistance carried out by Black People in La Española. Guess is a founding member of Antipod: A Radical Geography Podcast and Sound Collective. She earned a BA in Hispanic Languages and Literature and in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh. Outside of academia, Guess adores gardening and cooking, and she collaborates with many Black-led land justice, environmental, and food sovereignty initiatives locally and transnationally.

Allison Guess’s faculty mentor: Dr. Lissette Acosta Corniel, Center for Ethnic Studies at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY

Alana de Hinojosa is an interdisciplinary public historian and human geographer of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. In 2024, she will join the History Department at Texas State University as an Assistant Professor of Latinx History. In 2023, Alana earned her PhD in Chicana/o Studies from UCLA. Her dissertation, “El Rio Grande as Pedagogy: The Unruly, Unresolved Terrains of the Chamizal Land Dispute,” examines the landmark international land and boundary conflict along the El Paso-Cd. Juárez borderlands known as the Chamizal Dispute. In this work, Alana focuses on the minoritized stakeholders who are often removed from the Chamizal Dispute’s official record. In turn, Alana seeks to first uncover the layered, ongoing efforts to conceal the contested tract of land called “El Chamizal” and the stories of its minoritized claimants, and then use this terrain’s wayward, absented presence to reshape popular geographies and transnational histories of this region. Alana’s research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Texas State Historical Association, and the Center for Mexican American Studies at UT Austin, among others. Her work has been published in American Quarterly, Password, and Latino Rebels, among other non academic journals.

Alana de Hinojosa’s faculty mentor: Dr. Celeste R. Menchaca, Department of History, University of Southern California

Dr. Alexandrea Pérez Allison completed her PhD in English at the University of Texas at Austin in 2021 with a portfolio certification in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. In addition to publishing work in Aztlán, Latinx Talk, and Chicana/Latina Studies, Lexi was also an Assistant Director for the Lower Division Literature Program, focusing on pedagogical training for graduate instructors and enhancing the English curriculum at UT Austin. After completing her doctorate, Lexi spent a year as an Assistant Professor of English at Schreiner University before transitioning back to Austin as an eLearning Designer and Trainer for the Texas Legislative Council.

Alexandrea Pérez Allison’s faculty mentor: Dr. Amanda Ellis, English, University of Houston.

Dr. Ana Cristina Perry is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History. She received her PhD in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center focusing on Latinx and Latin American Art in the 20th century. Her dissertation examines Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s artistic and curatorial projects from 1966 to 1972. She argues that he developed these works to provoke emotional responses as a strategy of institutional critique and in response to the racial and economic inequities that he witnessed throughout New York City. Ortiz wrote about how institutional spaces suppressed emotion and affect by prioritizing “the passive aesthetic of the cerebral.” Ortiz instead sought to center the body and its physiological urge to act out in response to often challenging or contradictory emotions and feelings. In doing so, he developed strategies of institutional critique with the downtown vanguard and employed these strategies to build a critical museum within an art world that remained hostile to Puerto Ricans in New York.

Ana’s faculty mentor: Dr. Kristie Soares, Women & Gender Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

Rosanna Simons is a performer from the warm waters of Miami and a PhD candidate in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA. Her dissertation, “Choreographed Migrations: Refusing Settler Surveillance, Performing Recognition,” examines contemporary state surveillance against Latinx migrants in the United States and the repertoires of queer migrant artists whose performances, sculptures, and videos conjure pathways to protection, freedom of movement, and joy beyond the state’s view. Invoking frameworks of queer of color performance, settler colonialism, and governmentality, she develops a theory of what she terms the documentation regime, a settler-colonial technology of control that surveils racialized migrants in past, present, and future temporalities. Rosanna is co-founder of the bozalta collective and co-editor of the online journal bozalta: arts, activism, scholarship. She has performed at numerous prestigious galleries and exhibitions nationwide.

Rosanna Simons’s faculty mentor: Dr. Michelle Castañeda, Dept. of Performance Studies, New York University

Dr. Alberto Wilson is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. Prior to his return to Texas, Dr. Wilson will spend the 2023/24 academic year in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the School for Advanced Research as a Mellon Fellow to work on his manuscript on the cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez during the final half of the 20th century. Dr. Wilson completed his doctoral studies as an IUPLR/UIC Mellon fellow in 2020/21 at the University of Houston’s History Department.

Alberto Wilson’s faculty mentor: Dr. Mike Amezcua, Department of History, Georgetown University