Visiting Scholars

• María Abizanda-Cardona
  

  Fulbright Visiting Scholar
  mabizanda@unizar.es
  
  Biography 
  María Abizanda-Cardona is a Fulbright visiting scholar in the Department of English at UCR. Her host supervisor is Professor Sherryl Vint. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). In 2023 she was granted a four-year competitive Research Fellowship (FPU) by the Spanish Ministry of Education to carry out her doctoral thesis under the supervision of Dr. Sonia Baelo-Allué. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in English Studies from the Universidad de Zaragoza, for which she was granted an Extraordinary Degree Award, and a Master’s Degree in Literary and Cultural Studies in Anglophone Countries from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. 

  Her doctoral research explores the representation of posthumanity in 21st-century crime fiction by American authors, focusing on the effects of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies over definitions of personhood, ethics and social relations. Her research interests include critical posthumanism, transhumanism and biopolitics.

• Zongliang Yang
  

  Visiting Scholar / PhD Candidate
  (951)546-7864
  yangzongliang2018@163.com
  
  Biography 
  Zongliang Yang is a visiting scholar in the Department of English at UCR. His host supervisor is Professor Michelle Raheja. He holds both a BA and an MA in English Language and Literature. Currently, he is a fourth-year PhD candidate at the School of Foreign Languages and Literature, Shandong University, China. His research mainly focuses on animal studies, colonialism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism in American literature, particularly in Native American literature. His doctoral dissertation is titled “Animal Narrative in Contemporary Native American Fiction.” This research is funded by the joint doctoral program offered by the China Scholarship Council and UCR.