Ana Elisa Gomez Laris

After spending most of her life in California, Mexican-born Ana Elisa Gomez Laris moved to Germany in late 2011 to study at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. There, she is active in several committees and organizations as a student advisor and advocate, in particular for international and working-class students. Currently she is writing her master’s thesis at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies. In her thesis, she aims to construct a typology of legal and cultural citizenship based on creative fiction and non-fiction expressions of citizenship by undocumented immigrants and refugees in the United States. Building on this, she plans to pursue a Ph.D. in law, literature, and migration. A firm believer that the creative arts change lives, she has participated in several theatrical productions, most recently in a play exploring German leftist terrorism and as a production assistant at the Children and Youth Theater Zug in Switzerland.

Updated May 2019