Originally from Austin, Texas, Julia O’Keefe is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the joint Latin American Studies and Art History program. She attained her B.A. in Art with a concentration in Art History in 2011 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado. With the completion of her master’s thesis, entitled Immortal Tepetlacalli: An exploration of the corporeal and sacred box form, she earned her M.A. in Art History at Tulane in 2014. Prior to beginning her master‘€™s degree, she tutored students with learning challenges at Front Range Community College and worked for a National Parks Service project geared towards restoring ecological balance to historical sites. Julia’s research concentrates on investigating the development of Aztec material culture as a product and reflection of established ritual and political structures. Her interests also include Mesoamerican funerary traditions, antiquarianism in Aztec art and architecture, and the dissemination of ideas through cross-cultural contact.

Catherine Nuckols is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint Latin American Studies and Art History program. Her research focuses on the Maya hieroglyphic writing system and its related iconography, and broadly encompasses topics such as the interrelated nature of text and image, semiotics, and the aesthetics of text. She earned her M.A. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin and holds an undergraduate degree in Latin American Studies from Brigham Young University.

Rubén Morales Forte completed his M.A. in Latin American Studies in May 2020. His main interests are Maya Archaeology and Linguistics. He was also part of the Mellon Fellowship in Community Engagement, where he worked on a project to make Maya inscriptions available to everyone interested in them (Maya Scripta) and partnered to do so with a local museum in Dolores, Petén, Guatemala. In Fall of 2020, he began a PhD in Linguistic Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Tulane University.

Sedrick Miles holds a Master’s degree in Psychology Research from The New School For Social Research and a B.A. in Psychology from Morehouse College. Both within and outside academia, his work has explored the relationships between cultural identity, race, and social development.

Before joining the Stone Center, Sedrick has spent 15 years designing and conducting action-oriented youth policy training and programming for community based organizations. This included brokering relationships with between national and grassroots organizations collaborating in the areas of K-12 education, Higher Ed, civic education, leadership development, and juvenile justice reform.

Sedrick’s Ph.D. interests focus on the intersections between language, cultural identity, and transnationalism, taking a detailed look at the contemporary identities of Blacks in the diaspora and, in particular, the language interactions of Black American and Black Brazilian traveling communities.