Meet the Team

Emma Spies is a scholar-practitioner who has been working in higher education for over ten years. She holds an MA and a PhD in English from UCLA, where she was an award-winning literature and writing instructor in both English and Gender Studies. Additionally, she taught composition and critical thinking courses at Orange Coast College from 2024 to 2026. She began working as a Student Affairs Advisor at UCLA's Center for Scholarships & Scholar Enrichment (CSSE) in 2022, where she saw how her background in the humanities could inform her scholarship and fellowship advising. At the CSSE, her team worked with winners of the Marshall, Truman, Beinecke, Strauss, Udall, and Gilman awards; in addition to working directly with applicants, she organized outreach and recruitment efforts, worked with faculty and staff partners to support students, and planned events to raise awareness around award opportunities. Dr. Spies's academic work, which focuses on European modernism and Surrealism, visual culture, queer history, and urban cultural studies, has appeared in Pacific Coast Philology and the International Journal of Surrealism; she is currently working on a chapter about Back to the Future (1985) for a book on the suburban fantastic. A native of northwest Arkansas but a proud resident of Los Angeles since 2013, Dr. Spies is passionate about helping Southern California students navigate the often daunting fellowship world and is particularly focused on supporting first-generation, underrepresented students. She sees the fellowship application process as part of a holistic practice in which applicants learn to more clearly develop and articulate their goals, plans, and values, ultimately setting themselves up for success in any field they choose.