The Mellon Family: Berkeley Mellon Graduate Students



UC Berkeley has one of the largest cohorts of graduate Mellon students. They represent the best and the brightest of the MMUF programs across the US. There are approximately thirty-eight Mellon graduate students currently attending UC Berkeley; they are pursuing graduate studies in Africana studies, African American studies, anthropology, art history, classics, comparative literature, education, engineering, English, environmental studies, ethnic studies, German, history, Japanese, sociology, political science, public policy, rhetoric, and physics.


Our Mellon graduate students hail largely from undergraduate MMUF programs outside of California, such as those at Brown University, Carleton College, Dillard College, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Swarthmore College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. Mellon graduate students from California institutions attended Stanford University, the University of Southern California, and the California Institute of Technology. All together, our Mellon graduate students are a diverse group, representing 20 undergraduate institutions across the US.


These Mellon graduate students serve as role models for incoming cohorts of UC Berkeley's MMUF students, but they are also the heart and soul of the MMUF program as they progress through their graduate programs and earn their doctoral degrees. They are the reason that the MMUF program exists. We value and support their work, and we look forward to the time when they join the ranks of the academy.


Sasha-Mae Eccleston
Born in Jamaica, but raised in NJ, Sasha Eccleston comes to Berkeley after completing her M.Phil. at Oxford and her B.A. at Brown. Her main interests are the Ancient Novel, with a particular focus on Apuleius and the notion of kinship, the author function in both ancient and modern literature, and poetry of all kinds. Lucky enough to have attended various schools to which she attributes her intellectual development, Sasha loves to help students find their educational niche through a variety of programs, schools, fellowships, and experiences. She has worked as an editorial assistant, educational consultant, mentor, peer advisor, and even radio counselor. She is ecstatic to join the Mellon family here at UC Berkeley and looks forward to being of service in any way she can.


Angel R. Gonzalez
Angel R. Gonzalez is committed to the development of popular education that deals with issues of masculinity, patriarchy, homophobia and sexist oppression. His interests include Masculinity/Gender Studies, Education in Social Movements, Social Theory, Critical Pedagogy and the Sociology of Education. At present he is examining the historical and sociological development of American masculinity and its effects on boys of color in U.S. schools and beyond. He received a B.A. in Sociology from Hunter College at the City University of New York and an M.A. in Education at University of California, Berkeley. While at Hunter he was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and took part in ALL CITY, a collective of grassroots community organizers. As a member of ALL CITY he was a facilitator of the popular education programs targeted at high school and university students. Currently he is a doctoral student in the Social and Cultural Studies in Education program and is in the campus-wide Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality. Angel works with the Urban Promise Academy in Oakland where he mentors and teaches a course in critical media literacy for young men.


Teresa Gonzales
Born and raised in Mexican Chicago, Teresa I. Gonzales graduated as an adult student from Smith College with a B.A. in Latina/o & Latin American Studies. While at Smith, she was involved in mentoring high school girls and organized citizenship workshops for immigrants. Although she was torn between graduate programs in literature, sociology, and city planning, her commitment to social justice and understanding society's role in shaping and perpetuating inequalities led her to U.C. Berkeley's Sociology department, where she is currently a doctoral student. Her interests center on issues of gentrification, inequality, and access to resources in urban areas. Before attending college, she worked in the Information Technology sector and was involved with community organizations. Outside of academia, Teresa enjoys listening to all kinds of music, eating good food, dancing, particular to Bomba, Spanish Rock, or Merengue, and watching trashy television.


Ianna Hawkins
Ianna Hawkins Owen graduated as the 2008 valedictorian of the City University of New York, Hunter College with a BA in Africana Studies. She presently in the first year of her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in African Diaspora Studies and is a recipient of the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. In the past, Ianna has organized with All City (a grassroots popular education collective), the Audre Lorde Project (working to end police and hate violence against queer and transgender people of color), and Anarchist People of Color. She is also a published poet. Ianna looks forward to becoming a professor one day.


Monica Huerta
Monica Huerta graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 2003, where her honors thesis, "The Burrito Dream: Authenticity and Cultural Hybridity in Mexican Restaurants in late twentieth-century Chicago" was awarded the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies Latino Studies Prize. At Princeton she completed an M.A., working with Daniel T. Rodgers, Elisabeth Lunbeck and Hendrik Hartog on twentieth-century American cultural history. Since arriving at UC Berkeley in 2007, she has focused her research in the English department on documentary photography, history-writing, and forms of public intellectualism. This spring Monica was awarded the Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellowship. In addition to her academic work, Monica sits on the Graduate Program Committee in the English department, serves as a mentor through the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, co-organizes the Transnational American Studies Working Group, teaches a research seminar for Cal's Summer Research Opportunity Program, and obsesses on a daily basis about avocados. Monica thinks the best thing that has happened to her in the Bay has been acupuncture.


Priscilla Layne
Priscilla Layne is currently in her fourth year of the Ph.D. program in German Literature and Culture with a designated emphasis in Film Studies. She is interested in issues of race, rebellion and the circulation of African-American images in German literature, music and film. After receiving her B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago in 2003, Priscilla served as a Fulbright Teaching Assistant in Berlin. The following year, she was a grantee of the Study Foundation of the Berlin House of Representatives and conducted research on the left-wing skinhead milieu. She has also interned as a translator in the English program at the Deutsche Welle in Bonn. In March 2008, she and a colleague co-organized the 16th Annual Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference at Berkeley entitled "Rebellion and Revolution." The same year, she and two colleagues won the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation for their work on Feridun Zaimoglu's Koppstoff: Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der Gesellschaft. She has published her work in Transit: A Journal of Travel, Migration and Multiculturalism in the German-Speaking World and presented conference papers at the University of Cincinnati, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Texas at San Antonio.


Seulghee Lee
Seulghee Lee is a Ph.D. student in English. Born in South Korea, he grew up in Chapel Hill, NC. He graduated from Williams College with highest honors in 2007, receiving the English department's prize for best senior thesis-a project he had begun as a Mellon fellow. In addition to Mellon, at Williams he served as a freshman residential advisor, a DJ at the campus radio station, an elected board member of the Black Student Union, and on various departmental committees. His research interests include African American poetry, black postmodern fiction, cultural theory, and the Black Arts Movement. His figures of inquiry have included Amiri Baraka, Paul Beatty, David Hammons, and KRS-One. Apart from literature, his passions include listening to and collecting music, playing clarinet, and watching North Carolina basketball.


Marques Redd
Marques Redd is a Libra born in the Year of the Pig (1983). Hailing from Macon, GA, he graduated magna cum laude in 2004 from Harvard University with degrees in Social Studies and African and Afro-American Studies. His senior thesis on Plato won best thesis awards in both departments. While at Harvard, his biggest accomplishment was becoming a semi-finalist in the College Jeopardy! Tournament of 2005. Now, he is a fifth year PhD candidate in English Literature at Berkeley. His dissertation "Imaginal Mapping, Psychospirituality, and the Multi-dimensional Complexities of British and American Romanticism" is an avant-garde theoretical blend of archetypal psychology, ancient Egyptian religion, and quantum mechanics. After getting tenure somewhere by writing definitive essays on literary figures such as Jay Wright, John Crowley, Gerard de Nerval, and Fernando Pessoa, he hopes to write an encyclopedic book on African American music from the 18th century to the present. If he can find time, he wants to start a Mellon reading group to delve into the work of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.