New Proseminar Successes with UC President's Postdoctoral Fellowships—Nancy Morales, Julio Orellano, and Jorge Omar Ramirez-Pimienta

Julio Orellano is a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow 2023-2025 at UC Santa Barbara. He is on the advisory board of the Global Latinidades Center, as well as a member of the Central American Studies Working Group at UCSB. His research focuses on the political economy of forced international migration from Guatemala, race, and labor. He received his Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside.

Nancy Morales is an Indigenous queer (Zapotec) feminist scholar UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow 2023-2025 in the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. She earned her PhD in Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara in 2023. Her research interests are Indigeneity, children of Indigenous migrants, settler colonialism, sovereignty, and Native/Indigenous and women of color feminisms. She was enrolled in four consecutive Fellowships/Grants/Scholarships proseminars: 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. Before securing the PPFP, the proseminars aided her in receiving the UCSB Chicano Studies Institute Dissertation Fellowship in 2021 and the AAUW Dissertation Fellowship in 2022. In her dissertation acknowledgment section, she thanked Dr. Olguin’s support: "I also want to acknowledge Dr. Ben Olguin’s Proseminar: Scholarship, Fellowships & Grant Workshop with Dr. Roberto Macias (best TA ever!), where I enrolled for four consecutive years. That course was extremely beneficial and I hope it continues to be offered to future doctoral students.” 

They both join the 2022-2024 UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow Jorge Omar Ramirez-Pimienta whose research and creative work focuses on the US-Mexico border region and explores the thematics of trans-nationality, identity, emergency poetics, landscape, and memory in transborder artists, scholars, and writers who traverse competing nationalist claims to geographies of space and culture. He is now an Assistant Professor for the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Santa Barbara.