ANNA WALSH

Anna graduated with honors from the Comparative Literature department at UC Los Angeles, with a concentration on French literature.  Although Anna's major was not explicitly political, she studied literature as a powerful tool for exposing oppression and for creating social change.  Anna's undergraduate career focused on literature's complementary role in postcolonial and feminist movements.   She spent half of her Junior Year abroad at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where she was influenced by many students who came to study Human Rights Laws near its international diplomatic center, The Hague.

During college, Anna was also an involved activist for peace, and the environment, creating and implementing recycling programs for a CO-OP of 500 students. During her last year at UCLA, she volunteered as an ESL tutor at a shelter run by the Coalition Against Slavery and Human Trafficking  (C.A.S.T) for women who had been trafficked into the US and held as slaves.  Her most meaningful work there was helping a woman write down her painful experience, which she later shared with many others at a conference for anti-slavery advocates.   Anna dreams of recording and publishing more personal stories from women who have survived modern day slavery.

Over the last several years, Anna spent significant time in México City with her young daughter.  In México she learned Spanish, and became more aware of the extreme poverty that motivates people to take such risks to immigrate, making them potentially vulnerable to modern day slavery.  Anna hopes that the Master’s program in Global and International Studies will help her more thoroughly understand the economical and political structures that still make slavery such a lucrative trade, and to empower her to further expose its prevalence, within California in particular. For her internship, Anna worked with the Eleos Foundation, in Santa Barbara, CA. and also completed a study abroad program in Mexico.