Graduate Fellows

Sal Ayala Camarillo is a graduate student in the Department of English.

Paulina Maria Barrios is a graduate student at the Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She holds an M.A. in Asian and African studies, special subject Africa, from El Colegio de México, and has experience working in translation and feminist resource mobilization. For her PhD she currently aims to analyze the use of literature by grassroots feminist and queer organizations in Latin America and Africa.

Aaron Martin is in his fourth year in the Rutgers Ph.D. program. He uses a variety of methods to study catastrophic risk and the role of predictive tools and practices in risk governance. Martin’s research examines how organizations and institutions assess uncertainty related to extreme risk and the implications of these assessments for risk policy and decision-making. He is currently a Fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers and has previously held Fellowships at the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute and the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. Prior to Rutgers, Aaron spent six years building partnerships between governments, foundations, and human rights organizations in Washington, D.C. He received his B.A. in English and Education from Houghton College and his M.A. in Sociology from Rutgers University.

Carolina Sanchez is a graduate student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She is a Fulbright scholar, M.A. in Literary Criticism and B.A. in Philosophy from the National University of Colombia. She worked for four years as Editorial Assistant of the Philosophy Journal Ideas y Valores and co-founded the Colombian independent publishing house: El lobo está en el bosque libros. She works on political transitions in Contemporary Latin America, representations of spaces and belonging in visual narratives, and poetics and politics of space. She uses conceptual tools from Ecocriticism, Continental Philosophy, Film Studies, and Literature.

Leo Valdes is a PhD candidate in the Department of History specializing in US-based social movements and the carceral state. Valdes’ dissertation explores the political cultures of Black and Latinx trans/nonbinary communities in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area. Valdes is an oral historian and community researcher who collaborates with grassroots groups including the Rikers Public Memory Project and Movimiento Cosecha.