Daisy is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Folklore. Her dissertation examines ruins, ruination, and archaeology in Rome during Italian Unification (1870–71), a moment when the emerging field of anthropology (demoetnografia/tradizioni popolari) began probing the underbelly of the city and its environs. Her research traces how such ethnographic and archaeological gazes perpetuated a colonial model of representation and forced modernization at the domestic level (Ó Giolláin 2023). Central to...
Lauren Bartone is a PhD student in Italian Studies with a designated emphasis in folklore.
Her background as a visual artist strongly informs her approach to studying Italian culture. Before joining the Department of Italian Studies at Berkeley, she completed a B.A. in Fine Art at UCLA, followed by an M.A. in Education at UC Berkeley, and an M.F.A. at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Previous work in collaborative map making, community dialogue, and participatory art forms led to her project A City in Maps, completed as the...
Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM)
Mairi is a doctoral student in UC Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management's Division of Society and Environment, with a designated emphasis from the Folklore Graduate Group. She is a data driven storyteller, seedkeeper, writer, and researcher working at the intersection of food systems, capital, land, natural resource management & governance, and community-based, culturally relevant economic development. Mairi has been conducting food systems research since 2019 and is currently exploring issues of ocean governance, property rights,...
Michele Segretario is a Ph.D. Candidate in Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
His dissertation, Diasporic Soundscapes of Fascism: Radio, Music, and Religious Festivals in Italian America, is an investigation of Italian diasporic identity formations in the United States centuries through soundscape analysis, focusing on how sonic practices mediated the transnational circulation of Fascist ideologies and aesthetics within Italian American communities. His research employs methods at the intersections of...
Hanqing Zhao is a doctoral student in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning and is pursuing a designated emphasis in Folklore.
Hanqing cares about the vast availability of meanings that rest in the indeterminacy of the human visual field, which encompasses ordinary, everyday life and everything we take for granted in the built environment. His doctoral research focuses on interpreting the “ill-mannered” behaviors and small social conflicts in contemporary Chinese urban public spaces to understand the concepts of and the relationship between the “self” and “publicness,”...
