About Us

Welcome to the web resource of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley. Our department is a medium-sized one, big enough to offer a wide variety of approaches to teaching and research yet small enough to afford students at both the graduate and undergraduate level personal attention and mentoring. We are proud to be a multi-disciplinary department, featuring innovative scholarship across linguistics, literature and cultural studies, new media, and film studies.

Across these and connections with other disciplines, our mission is to study the literary, cultural, and linguistic products of the Hispanic and Lusophone world in their diversity, and to legitimize, support, and empower the Hispanic and Lusophone-speaking and -studying students that we serve. We offer an abundance of opportunities to learn and achieve mastery of the languages and cultures we study, which include Catalan, Nahuatl, Portuguese, Romance Studies and Spanish. Our programs are specially designed for highly motivated students with a passion for other languages, literatures and cultures, linguistics, as well as for imaginative approaches to these and for careful crossing of traditionally defined geographic, linguistic and disciplinary borders.

Several of our faculty are formally involved with or active in other departments or academic units on campus: for example, Applied Data Science(link is external), the Center for Latin American Studies(link is external), Comparative Literature(link is external), Digital Humanities(link is external), European Studies(link is external), Film and Media(link is external), Gender and Women's Studies(link is external), Linguistics(link is external), Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures(link is external), the Center for Portuguese Studies(link is external), Renaissance and Early Modern Studies(link is external),Rhetoric(link is external), and the Spanish Studies Program