We are so proud of all of our alumni accomplishments! If you are an IRT alum and would like to share your news in an upcoming post or if you are an alumni author and would like to have your book posted on our alumni publications page, please reach out!
Omar Galárraga, IRT ’00
Congratulations to Omar recently awarded tenure and is the Professor of Health Services, Policy and Practice, and Director of the International Health Institute at Brown University.
Photo: Brown University
Sara LaBrie, IRT ’09
HarperCollins recently published Sara’s debut memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart. Sara is currently a self-employed writer.
Christina Cecelia Davidson, IRT ’09
Christina’s book, Dominican Crossroads: H. C. C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-Making in the Age of Emancipation is a 2025 ASALH Book Prize Finalist for the best new book in African American History and culture.
Aria Halliday, IRT ’11
Aria has recently published a new book with the University of North Carolina Press entitled, Black Girls and How We Fail Them. She is an associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Learn more about her other published works and research interests.
Elizabeth Gil, IRT ’11
Gil comments on her co-authored article, A Comparative Case Study of Learners Experiencing Interdependent Empowered Care in Marginalizing Contexts published in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. Gil, E. & McClure, D. (2025)
In the piece, we present our interdependent empowered care (IEC) framework. We developed the IEC framework as we conducted a cross-national study illuminating the role of care in educational settings to understand how it helps multi-age learners from immigrant backgrounds create nurturing communities. We also explore our findings’ implications for educators.
Darion Wallace, IRT ’19
Darion was awarded one of the 2024 NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowships. Darion is a Ph.D. candidate at the Stanford Graduate School of Education in the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education and History of Education programs.
Erica Kirk, IRT ’20
Congratulations to Erica, who was promoted to Assistant Dean of Academic Advising at the University of California, San Diego, Eighth College.
Photo: University of California, San Diego
Issay Matsumoto, IRT ’20
Issay is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Southern California. His article, “Transpacific Muumuus and the Rise of Japanese Neocolonial Tourism in Hawai‘i,” was published by John Hopkins University Press, in December 2024. Issay shares his research overview and link to a short post in American Quarterly on his article below:
My research broadly focuses on histories of capitalism, gender, and empire in the Pacific world. My dissertation particularly explores the social consequences of economic restructuring across the U.S. Pacific empire by tracing the rise of Hawaiʻi’s tourism industry and its role in integrating the United States, Asia, and the Pacific Islands after the Second World War. This article traces the movement of the muumuu dress between Japan and Hawaiʻi to reveal the crucial role played by Japanese women tourists in the rise of Hawaiʻi’s postwar service economy.
American Quarterly‘s blog titled “Beyond the Page” featured a short post about the connections between the history in my article and the present-day shape of transpacific fashion. Read the blog post.
Issay Matsumoto, IRT ’20
2024 Ford Foundation Fellowships Scholar Award
List of Awardees
Dissertation Competition
Leslie Patricia Luqueno, IRT ’19 – Sociology & Education – Stanford University
Post Doctoral Competition
Klein Hernández, IRT ’13 – History-University of Southern California
Christopher Rodelo, IRT ’14 – Performance Study – Princeton University
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Institute for Recruitment of Teachers 