News

In what ways can a Center for Latin American Studies contribute to decentering the very notion of Latin America? To what extent can often overlooked sensemaking practices be centered in a Center for Latin American Studies? How much can margins take center stage? Wapichana Indigenous artist Gustavo Caboco welcomes us to experience the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley as a site of critical inquiry and aesthetic practice, not as an enclosed space to be taken for granted but as a fertile soil for conjuring alternate itineraries, vocabularies, and belongings.

Our alumni Yairamarén Maldonado has recently published a terrific book of poetry, Ciencia ficción en el mirador. Sci-fi at the mirador, a bilingual edition of 169 pages edited by Ediciones Del Flamboyan (San Juan, PR) with drawings by Lorraine Rodríguez.

Congratulations to Ben Papadopoulos (Spanish and Portuguese) and several undergraduate UC Berkeley students, who presented various research talks on the Gender in Language Project at the 28th Lavender Languages and Linguistics conference, held over the summer in Catania, Italy!

Our Graduate student Gabriella Licata was recently interviewed by the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix for their official podcast. Gabriella was asked about her research on misogyny and political speech. You can listen or read a transcript of the podcast here: https://live-ssmatrix.pantheon.berkeley.edu/research-article/race-gender-and-political-speech-an-interview-with-gabriella-licata/

Felicidades are in order for Jesus Duarte (Senior – Double Major in Hispanic Linguistics [Spanish and Portuguese] and Linguistics), whose Senior Honors Thesis (advised by Professor Justin Davidson) was just awarded the Charlene Conrad Liebau Library Prize for Undergraduate Research! Jesus's paper, entitled “Sociophonetic Differences in Queer Speech of Spanish Speakers,” explores both the acoustic production and auditory perception of select sound features of Queer Spanish. Jesus's research incorporated library database materials, in addition to Berkeley Qualt

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese is thrilled to welcome Sabrina Grohsebner, a collaborator on the research project The Interpretation of Childbirth in Early Modern Spain at the University of Vienna and a Junior Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK). Her research on the role and representation of midwives in early modern Spain brings her to our department this spring semester until April 15, 2022.

Congratulations to Ben Papadopoulos. His short article, “A Brief History of Gender-Inclusive Spanish” was published in the Italian feminist journal Deportate, esuli, profughe. The article was written and published in both English and gender-inclusive Spanish (the x gender).