This fall we welcomed 3 graduate students into our 2026 Ph.D. cohort. Learn more about our new cohorts below.
Zain Aslam has a B.A. in English from UCLA where, for his thesis, he analyzed a few different modes of cultural hybridity in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956). As a graduate student, he intends to continue his examination of cultural evolution, with a focus on the relationship between diasporic literature and the cities they appropriate, recreate, and inhabit. Presently, his main interest is Black British fiction and the postwar transformation of London. Outside of academia, Zain has years of experience in art direction, non-profit administration, and arts programming. He is the author of I Don’t Remember (If A Leaf Falls Press, 2017) and his poems, translations, and essays have appeared in The Rumpus, 68 to 05, and elsewhere.
Alexis Caplan received her B.A. in English and Cinema & Media Studies from the University of Washington. As an undergraduate student, she completed an honors thesis that interrogated Richard Brautigan’s utopian impulse in In Watermelon Sugar from a Marxist perspective. She also conducted field research in Seattle’s Central District, where she participated in interviews with Black artists and photographed the neighborhood on film for an online archive. At UCLA, she aims to study twentieth and twenty-first-century African American literature, with particular attention to Black feminist and queer writers whose works have circulated unevenly through literary and archival institutions. She is especially interested in how marginalized texts preserve histories of community, relationality, and survival, as well as the ethical questions that emerge when neglected works are recovered and returned to institutional visibility.
Sara Son is a poet and writer from Queens. She holds a BA in English and Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins. She received her MFA from UC Irvine, where she taught creative writing and edited the program’s literary journal. Before graduate studies, she worked at startups for several years. She’s interested in how emerging technologies change the way we read, write, and construct formations of community and self.