Aaron Coleman
Aaron Coleman is the Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Translation Studies in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Aaron’s work explores intersections of poetry, translation, and critical comparison in the African Diaspora in the Americas. His first critical book project, Poetics of Afrodiasporic Translation: Negotiating Race, Nation, and Belonging Between Cuba and the United States, investigates translational relationships between Black poets in the United States and AfroCuban poets in order to compare their respective literary traditions and explore the transnational impact of the literary African diaspora in the Americas. Situating his own praxis as a translator and poet in relation to Black US-American poet-translators in the twentieth century (like James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes) undergirds his current translation project with Nicolás Guillén’s underexamined 1967 collection, El gran zoo [The Great Zoo].
Aaron is the author of Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018) winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and St. Trigger (Button, 2016), selected by Adrian Matejka for the Button Poetry Chapbook Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the J. William Fulbright Program, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association. He has lived and worked with youth in locations including Spain, South Africa, Chicago, St. Louis, and Kalamazoo. His poems and essays have appeared in publications including Boston Review, Callaloo, The New York Times, the Poetry Society of America, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. After earning his MFA in Poetry at Washington University in Saint Louis and working in the Public Projects Department at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Aaron completed his PhD in Comparative Literature with a Certificate in Translation Studies in 2021.
Miranda García – Graduate Student Coordinator, 2023-2024
Miranda García is a PhD candidate in the University of Michigan’s Department of Anthropology. She studies new media, advertising, entrepreneurship, and identity in Cuba and its diaspora. Her work draws on ethnography, oral history, and semiotic analysis to explore topics ranging from collective memory in Little Havana nostalgia shops to her current project on Cuba’s nascent private sector, including its emerging advertising industry. Miranda takes an interdisciplinary and multimedia approach to academic inquiry, pairing more traditional research with film and other media forms. Miranda is a fellow at the National Science Foundation, as well as the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies. She received a BA in anthropology and art history from the University of Chicago, where she was also a Mellon Mays Fellow.
Beatriz Manzor Mitrzyk
Dr. Beatriz Manzor Mitrzyk earned her Doctor of Pharmacy degree at the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy (UM COP) and completed a Pharmacy Practice Residency at UMHS. After completing a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the UM COP, she is now Clinical Assistant Professor and Assistant Research Scientist at UM COP. She conducts qualitative and quantitative research to address medication adherence-related health disparities in Latinx with mental health disorders and is an Ambulatory Care Clinical Pharmacist at the Saline Health Center. She also enjoys traveling, reading, gardening, exercising, and spending time with her family and friends.
Allyson Pérez
Allyson Pérez is a first-year American Culture PhD student at the University of Michigan. Her fields of study are Latinx Studies, Critical Food Studies, Cuban and Caribbean Studies, Migration, Labor, Nationalism, Diaspora, Restaurants and Food Businesses, and Politics. She plans to focus her doctoral research on Caribbean immigrant communities and how they create, perpetuate, and negate nationalist mythologies through food and restaurants. Using ethnographic methods, she would like to explore how food businesses in Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican immigrant communities become sites where people build communal identities and politics around food, nationhood, and race.
Silvia Pedraza – Faculty Coordinator, 2023-2024
Silvia Pedraza is Professor of Sociology and American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She was born and raised in Cuba, from where she immigrated with her family at the age of 12. Her research interests include the sociology of immigration, race, and ethnicity in America, and the sociology of Cuba’s revolution and exodus. Her work seeks to understand the causes and consequences of immigration as a historical process that forms and transforms persons and nations; as well as social revolutions’ rupture with the past and attempt to create a different present.
Professor Pedraza has been elected to numerous positions in the American Sociological Association (ASA), where she was elected Chair of three Sections as well as its Nominations Committee and Executive Council. In the Social Science History Association (SSHA) she was also elected to its Executive Committee and served on the Awards Committee. From the Latino/a Sociology Section of the ASA she received a major award: the Julian Samora Distinguished Career Award. At present, she is President of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE).
With a B. A. and M. A. from the University of Michigan, she has long been a Wolverine. She holds a Ph. D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago, where she specialized in Demography as well as Stratification, and in Latin American Studies. At the University of Michigan, she was also elected to various offices and is a two-time winner of the Excellence in Education Award. She was also honored by being inducted to the Golden Key Student Honorary Society.
She has received various grants and awards: nationwide from the National Science Foundation as well as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; at the University of Michigan from the College of Literature, Science, and Arts as well as from the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, she received several Faculty Research and Scholarship Awards.
She is the author of three books and numerous articles. A few of her publications include: Political Disaffection in Cuba’s Revolution and Exodus (Cambridge University Press, 2007); “Assimilation or Transnationalism: Conceptual Models of the Immigrant Experience,” in The Cultural Psychology of Immigrants, edited by Ram Mahalingham (Lawrence Earlbaum, 2006); and “Women and Migration: the Social Consequences of Gender,” Annual Review of Sociology (1991).
She has been frequently interviewed by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, BBC World News, The Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, the Ann Arbor News, among other newspapers, and has appeared on both radio and television. She also wrote an Opinion piece for CNN.com.
She just finished a manuscript that is presently under an advanced contract and review by the University Press of Florida, on Revolutions in Cuba and Venezuela: One Hope, Two Realities, together with Professor Carlos A. Romero, from the Universidad Central de Venezuela.
Alexander Stephens
Alexander Stephens is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Michigan and writes about migration, race, and law in the United States and Caribbean. At Michigan, he coordinates public history initiatives with the Immigrant Justice Lab and the Carceral State Project, and his writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and Jacobin, among other outlets.
Michaelanne Thomas
Dr. Michaelanne Thomas is an Assistant Professor/Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. Her work draws on the fields of Anthropology, CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work), and ICTD (Information Communication Technologies & Development) to study how people collaboratively design, access, and participate with internet technologies in constrained contexts.
Drawing on her training as a sociocultural anthropologist, her work focuses on under-represented groups to investigate (1) internet access in resource-constrained regions; (2) the design of citizen-led information systems; and (3) social media use for social change. Currently, she am investigating the ways people collaboratively innovate and make do amidst constraint and ongoing crises and the sociotechnical systems that emerge in these contexts.
She has been studying the multiple networks that make up the internet in Havana, Cuba, since 2014, focusing on the people and relationships that undergird the sociotechnical infrastructure of Havana’s internet.
Jennifer Triplett
Jennifer (Jen) Triplett is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan. She is a comparative-historical sociologist working in the subfields of political sociology, sociology of culture, and collective behavior and social movements. She is particularly interested in the political participation of traditionally marginalized groups (especially women) in various countries, times, and regime types. Previous projects have included examinations of state/movement relations in authoritarian Peru, women’s mobilization and party affiliation in post-Chavez Venezuela, and women’s contributions to ideas of nationalism in independence-era Cuba. Jen’s primary focus at the moment involves studying how the political salience of identities changes over time, using the case of gender in revolutionary Cuba. She received a BA in International Development, Classical Studies, and Latin American Studies from Tulane University. She also holds a MA in Latin American Studies from Tulane University and a MA in Sociology from the University of Michigan.
Aurelis Troncoso – Graduate Student Coordinator, 2023-2024
Aurelis Troncoso, M.A. (she/they pronouns), is a Doctoral Candidate in the American Culture Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Troncoso’s fields of study include intersectionalities of race, gender, (queer) sexuality, Afro-Latinidad in the Caribbean and the United States, Black feminist theory, queer and trans theory, and Afro-Caribbean religions. Her dissertation project focuses on the experiences of LGBTQ practitioners of Santeria and Espiritismo in Puerto Rico and how practitioners negotiate race, nationality, queerness and transness within sacred spaces. Troncoso obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Hampshire College in Multicultural Education, African Diaspora and Gender Studies (2016). Her capstone research titled La Rebelión de las Shangos: The resistance of Black Cuban Women in Regla de Ocha-Ifá, stemmed from two years of ethnographic field work in Cuba, and explored the empowerment of Black Cuban women in Ocha-Ifá (Santería) post colonization while negotiating race, gender, sexuality, nationhood and power. In addition, Troncoso has dedicated the last ten years to grass-roots organizing and teaching creative writing to youth through a social justice lens. Troncoso is a proud alum of the James Baldwin Scholars Program (2011) and a fellow of the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers (IRT, 2016). Some of her accomplishments include co-organizing an international exhibition in Cuba titled Addimú pa’ mi, celebrating Neo-African art. She is also a double time recipient of the Ingenuity Award recognizing her leadership efforts within local communities and beyond. Additionally, she served as a Graduate Student Representative to the Latina/o Studies Advisory Board, where she reported concerns and solutions to the Department of American Culture, University of Michigan. Currently, Troncoso is the coordinator of the Cuban Diaspora Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Troncoso resides in Puerto Rico and is a Bronx native.
Kerry White
Kerry White is a PhD candidate in American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. They specialize in transgender studies, queer of color critique, ethnographic and blurred genre writing, and Cuban/Caribbean studies. Kerry is currently working on her dissertation, a blurred-genre ethnography of transgender subjectivity between Cuba and the United States, which interrogates broadly the ways in which trans and gender non-normative people in Cuba and the United States navigate racialized, colonial, and imperial sex/gender systems through the narration of their own stories of trans becoming. Previously, they received a master’s degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Florida and a bachelor’s degree from Lewis & Clark College.
