Emily C. Floyd graduated in May 2018 with a PhD in Latin American Studies and Art History. She earned her BA in Art History and Religion in 2009 from Smith College in Northampton, MA and her MAR in Religion and Art in 2012 from the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale Divinity School. Her master’s thesis is titled ‘La Cruz de Motupe: Devotion and Controversy in 21st-Century Peru.‘ Floyd has served as Associate Editor for Frequencies: an online genealogy of spirituality and currently serves as Editor for the Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (mavcor.yale.edu). Floyd has completed internships at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, Galeria Blanca Soto in Madrid, Spain, the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, OH, and at the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been awarded two FLAS fellowships for the study of Quechua and Portuguese, and a Tinker grant for research on colonial Peruvian print culture. She is the recipient of the American Catholic Historical Association’s John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award.
Her PhD dissertation project is titled “Matrices of Devotion: Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Limeñian Devotional Prints and Local Religion in the Viceroyalty of Peru.” The project centers on devotional prints made in Lima that depict saints and advocations of Christ and the Virgin specific to the Viceroyalty of Peru. Floyd studies the circumstances of Limeñian print production, circulation throughout the Peruvian Viceroyalty, and use-lives in the hands of Peruvians of diverse class, ethnic, and economic backgrounds in order to track the relationship between devotional prints and the rise of a unique regional Catholic sacred geography.
She is currently a Lecturer of Visual Culture and Art before 1700 at University College London.
Karla Daniela Rosas graduate from the Stone Center’s Latin American Studies M.A. program in May 2019. She earned her B.A. in Political Science and Philosophy from Loyola University New Orleans in 2015. While at Loyola, Karla was the recipient the “Outstanding Graduating Senior” award in both her departments; she also presented a Philosophy Honors thesis titled, “Creating the Illegal: A Sartrean Analysis of U.S. Anti-Immigrant Culture.” From 2014 until 2016 she worked with the Workplace Justice Project of New Orleans, first as a volunteer translator and later as the Wage Claim Clinic administrator. While in this capacity, she worked with WJP to provide mostly low-wage immigrant workers deprived of wages with access to education, litigation, and advocacy.
Prior to joining the Stone Center in 2017, Karla worked as a full-time paralegal for an immigration law firm in New Orleans, where she assisted in preparing petitions for political asylees, unaccompanied minors, and survivors of domestic violence. Currently, Karla is researching the development of “Alternatives to Detention” programs as forms of gendered immigration enforcement. She is also a member of Congreso de Jornaleros, an immigrant advocacy organization in New Orleans, and of the Undocumented Student Support Committee here at Tulane University. Her research interests include immigration criminalization, the experience of gendered “illegality,” gender-based violence in Central America, and immigrant networks in southeastern United States. A proud DREAMER, Rosas is originally from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, but grew up in Texas and Louisiana.
Erin graduated from the dual-degree J.D./M.A. program in Law and Latin American Studies in May 2019. She was a FLAS Fellowship recipient studying Portuguese. Her interest in Latin America began when she studied abroad in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2009. She received her undergraduate degree in Spanish from the University of Kansas. After graduating, she completed her TEFL certification and went on to work as an English teacher in Spain, Chile, and Uruguay. She has also worked as a Spanish-English interpreter and translator both in the US and abroad. Her research interests include Latin American legal systems and US-Latin American relations.
Sara Kittleson graduated from the Stone Center’s MA program in Latin American Studies in August 2018. She also graduated from Grinnell College in 2012 with a B.A. in Anthropology. In 2009, she volunteered with the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages to help create an online audio dictionary of the Sauk language, and in 2011 she spent 4 months in Bogotá, Colombia, where she did volunteer translation for Colombian anthropologists. In 2012, she accepted a placement through Lutheran Volunteer Corps managing a food bank and daily lunch program at El Centro de la Raza, a latino community center in Seattle, WA. Her research interests include indigenous languages, cultural rights, and information activism.
Miranda Stramel graduated from Tulane’s Latin American Studies Ph.D. program in May 2019. Her dissertation explores the insertion of merchandising social messages related to women’s health into Brazilian telenovelas. Her research interests include environmental and health justice, social movement theory, media and cultural studies, gender inequality, and public policy formation. Miranda earned a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in Spanish and International Relations, and an M.A. in International Education, a Program of Intercultural Service and Leadership, from SIT Graduate Institute (formerly the School for International Training.) Previously in New Orleans, Miranda designed and delivered workers’ rights educational programs for the Workplace Justice Project at Loyola University Law School.
