2022-23 IUPLR/UIC Mellon Fellows

Dr. Luz Acosta (she/her/ella) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at Saint Xavier University. She was born and raised in Little Village, Chicago to immigrant parents from Durango, Mexico and earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research and teaching interests include the carceral state, race and the criminal legal system, the criminalization of marginalized folks, crimmigration, surveillance studies, mass incarceration and racial justice issues. Her dissertation project examines the hyper-criminalization of Latinx folks in a predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood of Chicago. She has taught at Governors State University and was a recipient of the Diversifying Higher Education Faculty in Illinois Fellowship (2017-21) and the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy Dissertation Research Grant (2021-22). As a proud first generation Mexican-American, she hopes her dissertation “The Hyper-Criminalization of Latinx Folks” provides a lens into the lived experiences of Latinx communities in the USA.

Luz Acosta’s mentor: Dr. Jennifer Ortiz at Indiana University Southeast.

Dr. Lisa Jahn (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Barnard College and a cultural anthropologist whose research combines ethnographic methods with feminist and critical social theory to explore racialization, gendered labor, care, coloniality, climate vulnerability and displacement. Her current research traces the systemic failures and exploitation of racialized care labor in New York City’s response to Puerto Ricans displaced by Hurricane María in 2017. The study centers a critique of the racialized violence within economies of care aimed at assisting populations displaced by environmental disasters, while simultaneously demonstrating how diasporic women create alternative modes of recovery through radical forms of care. This ongoing project reflects a broader research and teaching focus on issues related to Latinx/é studies, diaspora, transnational feminism, racism, and decolonial struggles. She teaches courses on Latinx/a/é New York City, Feminist Ethnography and American Studies.She has co-authored numerous articles as part of the Findings Collective in Anthropology Now and a white paper for the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene on Sexual and Reproductive Justice and Community Engagement. Prior to joining Barnard, Jahn was an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College, CUNY for seven years. She completed her Ph.D in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Lisa Jahn’s mentor: Dr. Rosalyn Negrón at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Dr. Brenda Selena Lara (she/they/ella) is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz’s Literature Department. She received her doctoral degree from UCLA’s Cesar Chavez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies with an emphasis in Gender Studies and Experimental Critical Theory. Born and raised in South Los Angeles, her upbringing influences her historical, theoretical, and literary research analyzing LGBTQ+ Latinxs’ lives, knowledge, and deaths. Brenda Lara’s current book project “Turning to the Ghosts” examines queer Latinx scholars’ untimely deaths in academia. Her research has been awarded the IUPLR/UIC Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, UCLA’s Dissertation Year Fellowship, and the Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship. Brenda Lara’s in-press publications include “Ciguanabas, Refugees, and Other Hauntings: Salvadoran Women’s Epistemic Hauntings Across Temporality, Space, and Borderlands” in Monsters & Saints: LatIndigenous Landscapes and Spectral Storytelling and “Cubans, Queers, and Quinces: Undressing Sexualities, Borderlands, and Feminist Rituals Netflix’s ‘One Day at a Time” in Queer Cats: A Journal of LGBTQ Studies.

Brenda Lara’s mentor: Dr. Yvette J. Saavedra at the University of Oregon.

Dr. Valentina Jager Lopezllera is an artist, writer, and translator from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. She obtained her Ph.D. in Creative Writing in Spanish from the University of Houston, Hispanic Studies Department in 2023. Her dissertation “Guía de campo al bosque nacional Sam Houston. Necroturismo y turismo verde en un bosque de Texas,” a cross-genre and multilingual artist book, asked how the different types of public works, monuments, public green spaces, and buildings in Huntsville, Texas, interact with the prison-industrial complex. Her dissertation was supported by the Inter-University Program for Latino Research/UIC Mellon Foundation and the Visualizing Abolition Dissertation Workshop of the University of California Santa Cruz in 2023. Jager is a 2024-25 Elaine G. Weitzen ISP Studio Program Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. Her practice as an artist-researcher has its core on the relationship between materiality and language, the explicit evidence of the writing body, and its production conditions. Jager continues to explore the historical use of green spaces as geographical boundaries for prisons and prison colonies in the Americas, now capitalized for touristic purposes.

Valentina Jäger Lopezllera’s mentor: Dr. micha cardénas at the University of California Santa Cruz.

M. Roxana Loza is from Mexico City and came to the U.S. (documented) when she was eleven years old, the same age as Gaby, one of the characters in the middle grade books she analyzes in her dissertation “Shelter(ed) Childhoods: Mental Health and Immigration in Latinx Children’s and Young Adult Literature.” A doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, Roxana’s dissertation project connects fictional narratives of immigration with contemporary immigration policies and builds upon scholarship from disability studies, mad studies, and trauma studies. She earned her M.A. in Children’s Literature from Kansas State University and her B.A. in English, French, and Psychology from Rice University. She has loved books since arriving in the U.S. because they were easier to understand than English-speaking peers and has taught public school Spanish Kindergarten.

Roxana Loza’s mentor: Dr. Cristina Rhodes at Shippensburg University.

Dr. Arón Montenegro (he/him/winaq) focuses on the role of visual and performance art in addressing intergenerational trauma among migrant communities. As a street artist who creates murals, zines, screen prints and theatre skits, his research is informed by creative practices facilitated outside of institutional settings. Prior to attaining his Ph.D. in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA, Arón was an independent journalist covering land conflicts in Central America and successfully stopped the construction of a Wal-Mart Supercenter in his hometown of El Monte, CA. As a survivor of physical and psychological abuse by the U.S. trained military in Honduras, Arón uses art to work through his personal traumas. Collective memory and intracommunal solidarity are themes used consistently through his creative and scholarly endeavors. His dissertation “Entre Flor y Fusil: Caribbean and Central American Cultural Memory in the Late and Post-Cold War Era (1968-2020)” was completed in Spring 2023. He is currently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society. His latest project is developing the Peoples’ Cafe, a hybrid soup kitchen and community arts space in his local neighborhood.

Arón Montenegro’s mentor: Dr. Macarena Gomez-Barris at Brown University.