About the Conference

Danielle is a third-year student in the Women’s Studies, PhD program. Born and raised in St. Kitts and Nevis, Danielle moved to North Carolina to continue her studies, receiving a BA in French and a BA in International Studies from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2010. She was then granted an Endeavor Award by the Australian government and pursued a Master of Development Practice at the University of Queensland. She then returned to St. Kitts and Nevis, serving briefly as the Executive Officer in the Department of Gender Affairs where she had the opportunity to represent the country at the 2016 European Union-Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (EU-CELAC) Gender Equality and Women’s Economic Empowerment Seminar in Brussels, Belgium. She recently completed an MA in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) and her current work investigates public health and notions of racialized contagion.

Nohely Alvarez is a Ph.D. Candidate in Urban Planning at the School of Architecture and Planning, and Preservation. Her focus and interests include the intersection of immigrant communities, transnational planning, participatory community building, social justice, gentrification, and equity development. She is particularly interested in advocacy and radical planning pedagogy in her field and thinking of ways the gap between practice and academia in planning can be improved. In her spare time, she likes learning about other cities, creating maps for side gigs, cooking, and playing with Son Cosita Seria (a DC-based Son Jarocho collective group).

Jonathan Brower is a doctoral candidate in the History Department. He graduated from the Johns Hopkins University in 2010 with a BA in History and Near Eastern Studies. At the University of Maryland, Jonathan studies the French Revolution, with an emphasis on questions relating to religion, identity and the nation during the Terror. His dissertation argues that the cultural and religious policies of the Terror were actually part of a larger project of nation-building during the French Revolution. Besides his dissertation topic, Jonathan is also interested in questions relating to the transnational experience of revolution in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Finally, both within and outside academia, Jonathan is passionate about community organizing and labor rights.

Sarah Dowman is a Lecturer at the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. She earned her PhD from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland in 2019. Her research analyzes the relationships among art, resistance, contemporary activism, and pedagogy in the context of hemispheric queer Latinx and Latin American (sub)cultural production, practices, spaces, and communities. Her dissertation, titled “Change Is Sound: Resistance and Activism in Queer Latinx Punk Rock,” highlights intersectional subjectivities within queer Latinx punk rock, placing focus on the marginalized while decentering the punk rock genre and its history in a way that challenges dominant narratives that exclude and erase diversity within the subculture. She is also involved in the punk scene as a fan, active participant, and musician, which sparked her interest in politics, music, and art, and loves to experience the subculture’s transnational and transatlantic nature through travel.

Sergio García Mejía is a Ph.D. student of the Civil Engineering department in the Center for Disaster Resilience at the University of Maryland (UMD). His research explores the intersections between infrastructure resilience, household recovery, disaster aid, and disaster management, explicitly concerning their manifestations in multi hazard-prone locations and vulnerable populations. Sergio graduated from Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala with a BA in Civil Engineering and then came to the US with a Fulbright grant to obtain an MSc in Civil & Environmental Engineering at UMD. Sergio has significant experience working in municipal and non-profit organizations in rural and semi-rural environments in Guatemala. In his free time, Sergio enjoys making music and pottery.

Naette Yoko Lee is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland (UMD) researching rhetorics of race. Her work considers the impact of commercial genetic testing on the maintenance of white supremacy in multiple global contexts. She has published an analysis of female Democratic candidacy campaigns in the 2018 U.S. mid-term election at the Rosenker Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership. In 2019, her contextualization of the speech text of Native American tribal leader George Gillette was featured by the Recovering Democracy Archives project. Naette is a University of Maryland’s 2017 Flagship Fellow and 2003 winner of the University of the West Indies History Department’s Eric Williams Prize for Excellence in Capitalism and Slavery. She is also the recipient of an Ann G. Wiley Dissertation Fellowship from the UMD.

Nancy Vera is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses on Afro-Mexican folklore on both sides of the U.S/Mexican border. She examines how the Afro-Mexican trickster figure Uncle Rabbit has recently transformed into a border crosser figure that disrupts settler colonial narratives.