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Emerging Scholars

About Emerging Scholars 

The Center for Latino Studies Emerging Scholars Program provides a forum for early career scholars from a wide variety of fields that relate to the academic discipline of Latino Studies in order to present innovative and cutting-edge research to students, faculty, and community members. ​​

2024-2025 Emerging Scholars Cohort

Javier Rivera 2024-25 Emerging ScholarJavier Rivera
Ambivalent Attachments: The Cringeworthiness of US Latinidad and Crisis of In/Coherence

Javier Rivera is a PhD Candidate at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication. His research interests include: US Latinx media and popular culture, embodiment and performance, aesthetics, and affect. His dissertation project, titled Ambivalent Attachments: The Cringeworthiness of US Latinidad and the Crisis of In/Coherence, considers the affective landscape of what makes objects of Latinx popular culture cringeworthy. From “no sabo kids,” to gentrification narratives, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, the project considers how desires for coherence and the readings of the resulting performances as failures structure an embarrassment-by-proxy popularly known as “cringe.” His work has been published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies. He has completed an MA in Mexican American and Latina/o studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to his MA, Rivera earned a BA in Women's and Gender Studies and a BS in Microbiology also from the University of Texas at Austin.

Samantha CeballosSamantha Ceballos
Latina Super-Heroes in the Hyphenverse: Beyond Superhero Borders

Samantha Ceballos is a doctoral student in English Literature with portfolios in Mexican American Latina/o Studies (MALS) and Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. As an interdisciplinary researcher, her interests intersect in various fields of study including literary studies, Latina/o studies, women and gender studies, and cultural studies. Her dissertation will address Latina characters in comics, film, and television who are existing in the Hyphenverse, a theoretical space where non-conventional and conventional super-heroes push against and beyond rigid understandings of superhero.

She is currently teaching The Rhetoric of Comic Books and works as a Graduate Assistant for the Latinx Pop Lab where she helps organize events. Ceballos received an MA in English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, an MA in Literature, Creative Writing, and Social Justice at Our Lady of the Lake University, and a BA in English at The University of Texas at San Antonio. Her scholarly work has appeared in The Routledge Handbook of Latinx Life Writing, El Mundo Zurdo 8, El Mundo Zurdo 7, the Southwestern Historical Quarterly journal and her poetry most recently appeared in the edited collection Hacina is How We Talk.