Graduate and Post-Doc Fellows

UCSD International Institute Sawyer Seminar Graduate Fellows

Noni Brynjolson (Visual Arts)

Noni Brynjolson is a PhD Candidate in Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. Her research analyzes socially engaged art practices in US cities that respond to uneven urban development through experimental forms of community building. She is interested in looking at how artists address the politics of housing and gentrification through their work, as well as the informal practices that emerge within these projects. Noni is a member of the editorial collective of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, and has published writing in FIELD as well as in the books Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (edited by Heather Davis, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017) and Craft on Demand: The New Politics of the Handmade (edited by Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch, I.B. Tauris, forthcoming 2019). She has curated several exhibitions, including On the Beach: Art and Public Space on the California Coast at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2014. 

Kevan Malone (History)

Kevan Malone is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at UC San Diego. He received his BA at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and an MA in American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His dissertation in progress, The Magnetic Frontier: Migration, Metropolitan Growth, and the Making of the US-Mexico Border, 1920-1997, examines the political ecology of transborder metropolitan growth in the San Diego-Tijuana region, considering what it means that these “twin” cities grew increasingly interconnected during a period in which the United States erected barriers on the international boundary between them.

UCSD International Institute Sawyer Seminar Post Doctoral Fellow

Emilio de Antuñano

As a historian of Latin American cities, I am broadly interested in the social, political, and cultural forces that shaped urbanization in the twentieth century. I received my Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 2017. My dissertation, “Planning a ‘Mass City’: The Politics of Planning in Mexico City, 1930-1960,” interrogates Mexico City’s transformation into a “megacity” through the lens of urban planning, particularly the planning of the seemingly informal and anarchic peripheries of the city. My book project, The Shape of a Megalopolis: Urban Growth in Mexico City, 1910-1960, examines the competing visions of the government, intellectuals, and popular groups that ultimately shaped Mexico City’s built environment. In addition to providing a fine-grained social history of the actors that negotiated the building of, and allocation of rights to, the city, my research casts light on the theoretical framework that made this process legible. My research and teaching interests also include the history of migration, the relationship between the social sciences and state policies, and the history of urban planning and architecture.

Recent publications include:

“Mexico City as an Urban Lab.” Journal of Urban History. Prepublished April 12, 2018 (Online before print).