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MariaCarolina is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of California Santa Barbara. She is an international student from Colombia. Her dissertation project investigates the contradictory meanings, fears, and expectations that U.S. culture ascribes to international students, and she writes about how the figure of the international student allows academic institutions to engage in border-making and exploitative relationships with the Global South while profiting from international diversity.

She received her undergraduate degree in Literary Studies at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia, and an M.A in English from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Before joining UCSB she was an English instructor at Howard University.

MariaCarolina was the Graduate Student Fellow at the American Cultures and Global Contexts Center in 2020-21, an Interdisciplinary Humanities Center  Public Humanities Fellow in 2021-22, and the Graduate Research Assistant at Las Maestras Center in 2022-23.

Research Areas

  • African American and/or African Diasporic Literatures
  • American Literature
  • American Race and Ethnic Studies
  • Global Literatures
  • Postcolonial, Migration, and/or Diaspora Studies