Graduate Student News

English master’s and doctoral degree students are active in a variety of research, teaching, and other creative and scholarly work. Below is just a sampling of our graduate students’ many activities and interests.

An article by Tabitha Espina Velasco, doctoral candidate, titled “Engaging Existing and Emergent Experiences: Narratives among Young Filipinas on Guam,” was published in Race and Pedagogy Journal: Teaching and Learning for Justice vol. 3.2. Velasco also presented as part of the “Asian (American) Settler Colonialism on Guåhan: Migration, Labor, War” panel at the 2019 Association for Asian American Studies Annual Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. In addition, she presented her paper “The Halo Halo Generation: Rhetorics of Third-Generation Filipino Identity on Guam” at the International Society for the Study of Narrative Conference 2019, hosted by Georgetown University and University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain. While there, she also chaired the “Race, Identity, and Narrative” panel.

Velasco was awarded the 2019 Karen P. Depauw Leadership Award from the WSU Association for Faculty Women and the Graduate School; the Avery Dissertation Fellowship in English; and the Laura Bassi Scholarship Partial Fee Waiver for 2018-19. She also was a named a Graduate Fellow for Humanities Washington. As part of the NextGen PhD grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she will be working with Humanities Washington as a Publicly Engaged Fellow to help identify obstacles between the humanities and underrepresented communities, such as the Filipino immigrant community in Yakima.

Jessie Padilla, master’s student, performed her spoken-word poem “This Was Supposed to Be” at Project Fearless: Shattering the Stigma of Sexual Violence, a night of art and performance at WSU. Her poem brings awareness to the lifelong impact of childhood sexual assault through a mother’s perspective. Project Fearless is sponsored by the Associated Students of WSU and was created to help shatter the stigma of sexual violence through performance and art.

Mark Triana, doctoral candidate, and Anna Plemons, clinical assistant professor of English, collaborated with campus partners of the Critical Literacies Achievement and Success Program (CLASP) from the College Success Foundation and Multicultural Student Services on the article “Crossing the Divide: How Department Chairs Can Better Support Underrepresented Students Through Institutional Collaboration” published in The Department Chair in January.

Leah Wilson, doctoral candidate, presented her paper “Apocalypse, Now!: Surviving the Pharmacopornographic Era by Imagining Queer Futures in Michelle Tea’s Black Wave” at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Just Imagine, Imagining Justice: Feminist Visions of Freedom, Dream Making and the Radical Politics of Futures in Atlanta. At the same conference, Wilson also participated in a roundtable, “Reimagining Women’s and Gender Studies Education: Just Pedagogical Choices for an Unjust World.”