2025–26 Graduate Certificate Students

Mac Elizalde
Wanda Harris
Nihal Khan

Johann Long is a Ph.D. student in the English department. Prior to beginning his program at UCLA, he obtained his M.A. and B.A. in English literature from California State University, Long Beach. Johann is interested in the study of the early modern period and the eighteenth century. He approaches both periods with a focus on queer studies and disability studies as well as finding continuity between the periods through his interest in women’s writing and communities. Currently, he is focused on exploring how writing created community for disabled women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

2024–25 Graduate Certificate Students

Rachel Glaser

Cristian Reyes is a PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Prior to beginning his PhD, he completed his B.A. in History at UC Irvine, his JD/MBA at Southwestern Law School, and his M.A. in Latin American Studies at UCLA. He is interested in the construction of race in early modern Spain’s literature and culture. In particular, he is interested in representations of Blackness and non-white peoples in early modern Spain’s literary and theatrical production and the effects such representations had on the racialization of Black Africans, Muslims, and Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

2023–24 Graduate Certificate Students

Sunhui Choi

Diana Echeverria Palencia is a Ph.D. student in the English department. Prior to beginning her program at UCLA, she earned her M.A. in English at California State University–Los Angeles. For several years she worked as an English/ELD teacher at secondary schools in Los Angeles and New York City. Diana is primarily interested in studying non-Anglo colonialism and its influence on Anglo literary culture during the early modern period. With a particular emphasis on the transmission of Spanish texts into English culture, she considers how English writers help mold the national imaginary while emulating Spain’s empire. Her transnational and multilingual approach to her research is heavily informed by growing up in a Spanish speaking household and her time studying in France.

Earl John Hernandez

Adela McKay Villegas

Sarah Ortiz-Monasterio is a first year M.A.-Ph.D. student in the UCLADepartment of Art History. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History and English Literature from the University of Miami and her Master of Philosophy degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge. Her MPhil dissertation entitled “Hide and Seek: Hidden Images in Mexican Modernist Art (Diego Rivera, Saturnino Herrán, and Leonora Carrington)” is an examination and analysis of images in artwork by the aforementioned artists that emblematize the fortitude of an innate Mexican identity and modernity. She has interned at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Norton Museum of Art, as well as held positions in cultural institutions in Palm Beach, Florida. Sarah’s exposure from a young age to early modern Indigenous and modern Mexican art and architecture has inspirited her to study how and why early modern Indigenous design and construction have informed and impacted modern Mexican architectural practices.

Gabriel Silva Collins completed his B.A. in Anthropology in 2019 at Williams College and is now an M.A.-Ph.D. student in the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. His research—developed through fieldwork ranging from archaeological excavations on the Peruvian central coast to contemporary studies of human-elephant conflict in Cambodia—examines interactions and categorizations of human and nonhuman environments in the Andes of South America. Gabriel’s M.A. focuses on contemporary Quechua understandings of Inka and Spanish Colonial history as related to botanical environments near Chinchero, Peru. He is interested in how ecologies of Andean-Amazonian transition zones in Peru and Bolivia relate to Inka border zones, and how contemporary Indigenous knowledge might inform archaeological research in those areas.

Sylvia Tongyan Qiu is a first year Ph.D student in art history at UCLA. Her research focuses on the mobility of gemstones and natural products at the Qing court and their intersections with the early modern world. She is also interested in transcultural objects and the transmission of material knowledge. At UCLA, she received her MA in Art History. Her MA thesis explores the decorative devices on top of hats worn by members of the imperial family and officials of the Qing court known as hat finials and discusses their embeddedness in the production of space, meaning, and hierarchy. Prior to arriving at UCLA, she completed her undergraduate degree in History of Art at University College London. She held internships and volunteered at the Palace Museum, the British Museum, and Sir John Soane Museum, and UCCA. Her current project investigates a Qianlong era celestial globe inlaid with pearls and explores the complex material, religious, ideological, and metaphysical translations that took place in the making of this anomalous globe.

2022–23 Graduate Certificate Students

Moises Machuca is a second year Ph.D student in the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA. He received his BA in Literature and Philosophy from UCSC in 2020. His research reconceptualizes classical military theory of ancient Rome and the Early Modern period and its consequential imprint on modern U.S. military culture, its literature associated with war, and both its philosophical and theoretical frames of strategic warfare. More specifically, he is interested in comparing combatants’ experiences and descriptions of war found in letters, diaries, memoirs, and correspondences between the intellectual climates of the 15th century to the Enlightenment. Along with the Certificate for Early Modern Studies, Moises is completing the Experimental Critical Theory Certificate with Prof. Zrinka Stahujak.

Emily Ostlander is a first year MA-Ph.D student in the UCLA Department of Art History. She completed her B.A. in both Art History and Urban Design & Architectural Studies at New York University, where she wrote her honors thesis on the androgynous representation of Saint John the Beloved during the European early modern period. In addition to her studies in New York, Emily has studied and worked internationally in Florence, Italy and Seoul, South Korea. Her combined experiences have inspired her to pursue the study of art history by following a transcultural narrative, specifically through topics such as the phenomenology and mysticism present in Buddhist and Christian early modern works of art.

Rebecca Smith is a third year in the Comparative Literature doctoral program where she studies early modern and modern(ist) texts in Spanish, French, and Nahuatl. At UCLA, Rebecca has received her masters in Comparative Literature, the graduate certificate in Urban Humanities, and the FLAS award for University of Utah’s Nahuatl Summer Program. Before coming to UCLA, Rebecca received her bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence College. She also studied at the Stockholm School of Economics, Pompeu Fabra University, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Currently, her work focuses on the feminization and racialization of Latin American spatialities with a special interest in Mexican modernist texts and the way the creation of the post-revolutionary mestizo identity is reflected, proscribed, and questioned in modernist constructions of space. Within her 20th century project, Rebecca is also tracing the way precolonial and colonial indigenous spatialities informed mestizo modernism through her work in 16th- and 17th-century Nahua maps.

Billy Traylor is a second year Ph.D. student in the Department of Musicology at UCLA. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music performance from the University of New Orleans and Northwestern State University of Louisiana, and a Master of Science in Information Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (archival and library science). An actively performing baroque oboist and recorder player, he is the founder and artistic director of the Austin Baroque Orchestra. His research is centered around early modern Iberia and Latin America, with particular interests in 17th-century Portuguese sacred music, the interaction between public and private musical life at the court of Ferdinand VI of Spain, and music at Oaxaca Cathedral in the 18th century.

Syon Vasquez is a Ph.D. student in the Interdepartmental Archaeology Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to arriving at UCLA, Syon received his B.A. in anthropology from the University of South Florida. While completing his B.A. he participated in fieldwork at several Classic and Postclassic Maya sites in the southern Maya lowlands. Additionally, during his final year of undergraduate study, Syon completed a thesis project in which he analyzed ancient figural geoglyphs associated with the Paracas culture on the southern Andean coast. As part of his studies at UCLA, Syon is currently undertaking an M.A. thesis project in which he is examining African diaspora architecture during the colonial period in Belize. Syon serves as a co-organizer of the Architecture Working Group and is also a member of both the Andean Lab and Architecture Lab at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

Sofia Yazpik is a Ph.D student in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the changes and movement of visual and material culture created in New Spain during the early modern period. She examines the relationship between, and translation of, pictorial and alphabetic writing systems in Mesoamerican colonial codices. She is interested in how Indigenous writers/painters incorporated Iberian traditions into their Pre-Columbian past to produce innovative forms of expression representative of their novel identities. Prior to graduate studies at UCLA, she worked in various cultural institutions, such as art museums, galleries, and university collections.