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Nicole Tubman

MA Candidate | folklore

Joining the folklore program after receiving her BA in art with a minor in folklore and popular culture at USC, Nicole finds her academic interests lie in the study of the Afro-Cuban religion Santería (also referred to as Lucumí). Having first been introduced to the religion through an Afro-Cuban dance class during her sophomore year as an undergrad, Nicole has dedicated her time as an MA candidate to the topic. Carried over from her interests in creating identity-based artwork, she aims to focus her research on the results that participation in the practice of orisha dance, and its connection with the religion historically and in the present day, has on Black identity among Afro-Cubans both in Cuba and among Santería communities here in the United States. She aspires to spend time doing research in Cuba, as well as with locally based orisha dance communities in order to gain first hand accounts from those who participate in the dance for her final thesis project.


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Cameron Johnson

PhD Candidate | Folklore

Having previously worked on collections at U.C. Berkeley’s Folklore Archive as well as those at the Minidoka National Historic Site and the Densho: Japanese American Legacy Project, Cameron’s interests are centered on the preservation and presentation of narratives in historically underrepresented communities. His current research within the Folklore program is concerned with the concept of archival authority and indigenous representation, specifically regarding the efforts to provide access to musical recordings produced and restricted in South Africa’s apartheid era. Cameron holds a B.A. of Anthropology and a minor of Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley and is eager to explore the various complexities of sound and object through a Folkloric lens.


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Brenda Umutoniwase

MA CANDIDATE | FOLKLORE

Brenda Umutoniwase joins the Folklore Program at UC Berkeley after finishing her undergraduate degree from Cornell University in International agriculture and rural development and Africana Studies. A member of Sistah Circle Collective, a radical black feminist Collective based and doing work in Rwanda, she comes into her research with this community in mind. Her primary interests lie in interrogating how gender and sexuality are in constant interaction with culture within colonial spaces in East Africa (what’s commonly referred to as the post-colonial African State). With reference to Rwanda in particular, she seeks to study how folklore genres like wedding rituals, legends & folktales, songs, plays inform(ed) how gender and sexual identities are conceptualized, formed and upheld, and she hopes to do this through archival work. Her other interests are in studying how folklore is (re)produced within spaces of liminality and precarity such as statelessness, homelessness, refugee situations & immigration, and what role it plays in survival projects. Broadly, Brenda hopes to question culture, what it is/isn’t/could be, through a folkloric lens, and uncover ways to use it  as a tool for and towards liberation of all oppressed people. 


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Sailakshmi Senthil Kumar

MA Candidate | Folklore

Born in Chennai, India but raised in Fremont, CA, Sailakshmi comes to the folklore program after finishing her undergrad in anthropology at Berkeley in the spring of 2019. Her interests lie in diasporic Indian-American communities in the Bay Area and how they conceptualize more taboo forms of health like sexual, reproductive, and women's health. Having worked in Tamil Nadu, India in the winter of her sophomore year of undergrad, she is particularly interested in how notions of taboo cross transnationally to become modified or re-contextualized in new settings through narrative, gossip, and rumor. An avid cook, Sailakshmi also spends her free time attempting various new recipes.


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Nalin Sindhurprama

MA Candidate | Folklore

Nalin received her BA from Chulalongkorn University in Thai language and literature with a focus on folklore. After graduating, she began researching the two decades that have ensued since the violence of the Khmer Rouge government in neighboring Cambodia. For her MA Thesis, she plans to conduct fieldwork on how Cambodians born after 1979 engage with narratives of the Khmer Rouge years that appear in memoirs, novels, films, comic books, political discourse, and official narratives. Her particular interest lies in how this generation uses media, including social media, to construct "Khmerness" in relation to the 1975-1979 period.



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Kate Brock

MA Candidate | Folklore

Kate received a B.A. in Creative Writing and Music Business from Anderson University in Indiana prior to pursuing an M.A. in Creative Writing at University College Cork in Ireland. There her studies included poetry and folklore pertaining to the Hag of Beara, Brigid, and Sheela-na-gigs. Her primary interests are women’s sexuality, femininity, and reproductive rights in Old and Modern Irish poetry and culture as well as the transformation of female figures in oral tradition and the archaeological record. She is currently studying Modern Irish and plans to conduct archival research in the National Folklore Collection in Dublin and ethnographic work in the West of Ireland.


Justin Limoges

MA CANDIDATE | FOLKLORE

Justin comes to the folklore program with a background in contemporary art, having held a range of positions at various museums and art spaces in the Bay Area and New York, including the Brooklyn Museum and the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. Most recently he was the Director of Exhibitions at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. His undergraduate study was at the now-defunct Corcoran College of Art and Design, and he maintains an art practice, though it now mostly revolves around projects connected to friends and family. He is interested in aspects of overlap and divergence between the worlds of contemporary art and the study of folklore. His research areas also include flea markets, forms of kinship and solidarity, radical traditions, grief, and Black study. He served as the UCB Folklore Archivist for the 21-22 academic year.


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Leah Busby

MA Candidate | Folklore

Employed as a lawyer specializing in high-profile wrongful conviction cases, Leah succeeded in freeing three men who had been wrongfully imprisoned for decades. More recently, she has worked as a visual artist and is learning jazz piano. Her creative work led her to a deep interest in altar-making, along with the belief systems, narratives and visual dynamics that surround them. Her research will take her to Cuba and possibly other sites in the Caribbean, where she is interested in exploring how altars—like jazz and public sculpture—straddle public/private borders and are vulnerable to time and the environment as they open up forms of collaboration and improvisation.


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Kyoko Nagahashi

MA Candidate | Folklore

Kyoko Nagahashi graduated from UC Davis with a background in anthropology and math, where her work centered on aesthetic and medical anthropology, and science-technology-society (STS) perspectives. Building on her interest in medical devices, she plans to explore how such devices enable online “consumers” to construct notions of the body and map boundaries between self, body, and device. A particular focus is on an insulin pump designed for children, and she hopes to investigate how parents use such platforms as Reddit forums to project children's bodies and minds and to give advice that engages and complicates that which is offered by biomedical practitioners.


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Kristine Barrett

MA Candidate | Folklore

Kristine Barrett received her BFA in New Media, Photography, and Art History before taking an MFA in Electronic Music Composition and Recording Media. She is interested in exploring connections between art historical sources, textile practices, and women’s vocal music traditions as a means of deepening and extending women's histories and narratives and ways that they are researched. She has studied Old Norse, Old Irish, and modern Irish and Swedish. A vocalist, choral director, and visual artist, she has performed in a range of traditional vocal musics and created works through embroidery/needlework and multi-media.