Jacqueline Barrios
Research Associate, 2018-20 UHI Fellow
Jacqueline Barrios is a PhD student at UCLA's Department of English studying London and 19C British/American literature. Her current project investigates London-Pacific transurban imaginaries—geographies of East Asian Pacific Rim entanglement with the British capital. She has written about scavengers, servants and other minor figures and is tracing these figural tropes in linked urban contexts, as well as experimental pedagogies in poetry and the novel through methods gleaned from the material and archival practices of writers and artists. Jacqueline is a member of UCLA’s Experimental Critical Theory and Urban Humanities Institute (UHI). She leads with others the UHI Alumni Salon, a graduate student group whose research sits at the intersection of urban planning, design and the humanities. Her interdisciplinary interests connect her research to her other role as a veteran public school teacher of underrepresented youth in South Los Angeles, for whom she directs LitLabs, orchestrating guest experts from the humanities, architecture and the arts to imagine new pedagogy for the 21st century urban teen reader of the 19th century novel. Under her direction, students annually culminate their study by adapting the novel in site-specific productions, exhibitions and festivals-rare public humanities events that highlight their study of literature in and for their community.