Meet the 2025-2026 students of the Graduate Certificate in Migration Studies

Paul’s research examines contemporary Central American cinema and its use of self-reflexive strategies to question how stories of migration, conflict, and identity are told. He analyzes how filmmakers grapple with issues of representation and complicity while working within the region’s cinematic landscape. Drawing on film theory, cultural studies, and decolonial approaches, he treats cinema as both artistic expression and philosophical inquiry. His background in literature and cultural studies in Guatemala, together with his experience as a filmmaker, grounds this work in both creative and critical practice.

Tamar’s research focuses on the global rise of the New Right and the cultural struggles they have waged across higher education, literary publishing, and the “Western canon.”In particular, Tamar studies the “intellectual slippages” of the political movement in which the far right, to achieve its vision of a counter-liberal hegemony, has begun to borrow from the critical inheritance of Marxist cultural theory. She is researching the intersection of German memory culture and immigration discourse. In particular, she focuses on the way contemporary narratives of migration have converged with the myth of “imported anti-Semitism” to advance a politics of exclusion across Germany and the United States.