Alejandro Beas Murillo

Alejandro Beas Murillo (he/him) is a doctoral candidate in the English department at UMass Amherst. Alejandro’s dissertation interrogates popular and hegemonic hypermasculine and cultural-nationalist depictions of grand marronage and the maroons; analyzing the work of Dionne Brand, Maryse Condé, Évelyne Trouillot, Mayra Santos-Febres, Erna Brodber, and Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, he approaches marronage not exclusively as a form of armed resistance but as a Black feminist and queer narrative and poetic praxis. Alejandro has been an educator for more than ten years, teaching at the college, high school, and elementary school levels in Spain and the USA. He is currently an instructor in the English program at UMass and a faculty member in the Writing department at Thrive Scholars.