Vierelina Fernandez

Biography

Vierelina is a doctoral candidate and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the International Relations Ph.D. program at FIU. She joined SIPA in the Fall of 2016 as a McNair Fellow enrolled in the dual M.A./Ph.D. program, and recently completed her Master’s in Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Prior to coming to Miami, Vierelina completed her undergraduate degree in International Studies in Chicago at DePaul University. She has studied, collaborated, and conducted research with various universities across Latin America, including the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), the Universidad Panamericana (Guadalajara), and the Universidad Piloto de Colombia. She was also recently awarded a Tinker field research grant, which allowed her to return to Colombia to conduct research once more in the Fall of 2019.

Her current work focuses on gendered war, guerrilla groups, women fighters, and feminist I.R. security and democratization theory. For her dissertation, she hopes to carry out a mixed-methods comparative analysis on the female forces of the Colombian FARC and the Kurdish YPG.