Elisabeth Baker

Spanish-English Bilingual Children’s Overregularization of Irregular Verbal Morphology: The Cases of Spanish Second- Person Singular Preterit and Irregular Past Participles

Elisabeth Baker-Martínez is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her research interests include child language acquisition, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, and language contact. Her dissertation, Spanish-English Bilingual Children’s Overregularization of Irregular Verbal Morphology: The Cases of Spanish Second-Person Preterit and Irregular Past Participles, Examines the Ways in Which Spanish Monolingual and Bilingual Children Acquire Irregular Spanish Verbal Forms. Her research demonstrates that all children– monolingual and bilingual alike – are pattern-seekers, and this guides their language development. Through her research she aims to highlight that bilingual speakers are not less adept language learners, but rather, that their linguistic experiences are unique and thus naturally show variances in comparison to monolinguals’ acquisitional trajectories. Elisabeth reclaimed her heritage language of Spanish as an adult and works to advance heritage language maintenance through her research.

Carter Barnwell

Wars of Position: The Construction of an Antifascist Public Sphere in Spain, 1931-1939

Carter Barnwell is a Doctoral Candidate in the UNM’s History Department, specializing in Modern European cultural and intellectual history with a focus on twentieth century Spain. His research interests center on European political culture during the Interwar era, and he has been analyzing antifascist discourse as a unifying signifier for disparate political groups of the volatile 1930s.

Focusing especially on antifascism’s affinities with democracy, his work examines how political messaging in Spain was crafted to address and foster a growing demographic of Republican citizens, and how these messages were received and interpreted by active publics. In analyzing public discourse, performative speech acts, visual culture, and mass public gatherings he hopes to elucidate the ways in which Spanish antifascists embraced the Enlightenment concept of the public sphere to galvanize support for expanded democracy under the Second Republic, against a hostile backdrop of European fascism. His archival research was previously supported by generous fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the Latin American and Iberian Institute.

Kalila Bohsali

The Reading Room: Reading for Pleasure in the Literature Classroom

Kalila Bohsali is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature. Her fields of study are literary pedagogy, contemporary literature, composition pedagogy, the scholarship of teaching and learning, learning sciences, and reading practices. She is primarily interested in using social science research methodologies to study best practice solutions for the literature classroom. Her dissertation, The Reading Room: Reading for Pleasure in the Literature Classroom, explores the use of reading for pleasure as a teaching modality for the literature classroom.

Zonnie Gorman

The First Twenty-Nine: A Microhistory of the Original Pilot Group of Navajo Code Talkers

Zonnie Gorman is a Diné Ph.D. candidate in History with a graduate minor in Museum Studies. Her areas of interest and focus are Indigenous Masculinities, 20th Century U.S. Military History and Memory Studies. Her dissertation focuses on the first nine months of the Navajo Code Talker program and recounts the journey of the pilot group of Diné men into military service tracing their lives from the pre-World War II Navajo reservation to their recruitment and boot camp experiences, and finally, to the creation of the first Navajo code. She pushes back against popular narratives by introducing the idea of linguistic and culturally based coding techniques while interrogating the bicultural complexities that shaped Diné manhood in the mid-twentieth century.

Nathan Leach

The Social Matter of Opioids

Nathan Leach is a Doctoral Candidate in the American Studies Department. His dissertation, The Social Matter of Opioids: Glitches in The Reproduction of Capital Beyond the Human conceptualizes the politics of opioid use in the United States and its entanglements with histories of imperialism, counterinsurgency, biomedical surveillance, and notions of critical animistic sociality. Traversing a wide range of sites of inquiry, The Social Matter of Opioids considers the interspecies relationality of bacterial infections, draconian brain science, and the moral panics of fentanyl hysteria. By paying close attention to the ways in which opioids are a force of social materialization, Nathan considers how forms of resistance, vulnerability, and risk are entangled with subversive ontological conformation that challenge colonial and capitalist social reproduction.

Emily Reiff

Grievability and the Contingency of Life-Value in 21st-Century Science Fiction

Emily is a PhD candidate in British and Irish Literary Studies at UNM. Her research interests include colonial and decolonialnarratives, science fiction, and transnational feminisms, and her dissertation analyzes relationships between human and posthuman characters in literature through Judith Butler's framework of grievability. Throughanalysis of works by British,Irish, and Caribbeanauthors who grapple with legacies of British colonialism and imperialism that relied on the dehumanization of colonized people, Emily argues that these texts offer opportunities to consider new perspectives on human and nonhuman rights outside the charged contexts of our realities. Her work highlights the inconstant nature of grievability for human and posthuman beings due to the persistence of gendered, racialized, and ableist value systems which influence interpersonal and interspecies relations, and is deeply critical of the arbitrary nature of systems by which humans deem "others" to be expendable.

Joseph Ukockis

Interdependence and Place in Mescalero Homelands

Joseph Ukockis is a PhD candidate in History whose research focuses on inter-community relationships in the Mesilla Valley and surrounding areas from the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. His dissertation considers the endurance of Mescalero Apache sovereignty over their homelands throughnetworks of communityinterdependence among themselves and other groupsof people. He is also interested in deconstructing archival fictions of Indigenous criminality that have served to justify settler violence into the present day. Joseph received his BA in History at the University of Arizona and his MA in History at Northern Arizona University.

Deborah Wager

Co-Constructing the Common Ground: Recipient Responses and Their Effects in ASL Conversation

Deborah Wager is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics. She is particularly interested in the pragmatic patternsof language, includinghow people expressand understand their shared knowledge. Her research explores the structure of conversations in American Sign Language, focusing on ways in which information and understanding are presented, marked, acknowledged, and challenged in the course of a conversation. Better understanding of these interactional norms can be used to support language instruction as well as to further knowledge of linguistic structure.