Professional Title:
Graduate Advisor: Arturo Arias
Email:
Bio:
Maria Elena Arias-Zelidon a Ph.D. student of Interdisciplinary Humanities in the School of Sciences, Humanities and Arts at the University of California, Merced (UC Merced). She is working with Dr. Arturo Arias. Her research project looks at how the Maya agency subverted colonial power on the Guatemalan altiplano: tracing the pre-Columbian roots of cultural legacy on literature, language, and iconology. This investigation stems from the exploration of the colonial period, there is clear-cut evidence in multiple expressions of a continuous and non-interrupted resistance to Spanish colonization, and the imposition of Western-centric values.
Arias-Zelidon has an A.B.D. from Temple University (TU), Pennsylvania, a degree that she will complete after her doctorate at UC Merced. The research project is on the cultural transmission, or more specifically, on how cultural artifacts have traveled through continents since the 16th century. Following this line of thought, she attempts to study historical documents and literary texts to proposes a historiographic perspective on the development of the geopolitics of modernity. She earned an M.A. in Hispanic Studies from Villanova University, Pennsylvania and B.A. in Architecture & Design from Universidad Dr. José Matías Delgado, El Salvador.
Research Areas:
