News

We warmly congratulate Gabriel Lesser, who was awarded the Latin American Studies Association’s (LASA) Nineteenth Century Section Best Doctoral Dissertation Award. He received his PhD from the Spanish & Portuguese Department in 2025. His dissertation, “Hegemonic Humor: Racial Satires, Caricatures, and Nation Building in Nineteenth-Century Mexico and Brazil,” offers a compelling comparative analysis of how humor shaped racial imaginaries in nineteenth-century print culture, challenging established narratives of nation-building in Mexico and Brazil.

¡Felicidades to Jhonni for being a recipient of this year's Distinguished Teaching Award! This award is given to a very small group of faculty from across campus in recognition of their talents in the classroom. 

We will celebrate Jhonni's achievement at a campus wide ceremony on Wednesday, April 22 at 5pm in Jarvis Auditorium.

Professor Alex Saum-Pascual recently participated as a featured speaker in the international summit "El poder del trabajo en tiempos de algoritmos: Reinventando el empleo digno," a high-level event hosted in Madrid by the Spanish Ministry of Labor and Social Economy.

Held on March 4 and 5, 2026, under the leadership of Yolanda Díaz, the Second Vice President of the Government of Spain, the conference gathered global experts to address the critical intersection of labor rights and emerging AI technologies.

With profound sorrow the Department of Spanish and Portuguese announces that Professor Milton Azevedo passed away Friday, March 6, 2026, after a long illness.

Professor Azevedo (born in Ouro Fino, Minas Gerais, Brazil, April 7, 1942), received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell. He taught there and at the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana before coming to Berkeley in 1976 as Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Director of Language Instruction.

Derek Allen received the Berkeley-Portugal Research Fund through The Center for Portuguese Studies, which supports cooperation between UC Berkeley and Portugal. Derek will perform research in Portugal during Spring 2026 under the supervision of Professor Maria do Carmo Piçarra at ICNOVA in Lisbon. 

Spanish and Portuguese Graduate Student Marguerite Morlan published an article entitled "Metalinguistic evaluations of language choice in the linguistic landscape of Catalonia" in the International Journal of Multilingualism. The paper examines language ideologies revealed by locally raised Catalans in their reflections on patterns of language choice in graffiti and similar unauthorized signs in Catalonia’s linguistic landscape.

A tradition in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley, S&P Research Day occurs in the first week of the Spring semester. This year, we gathered for the third annual S&P Research Day to hear our colleagues' presentations on anything from research topics, conference papers, dissertation chapters and other academic or creative works.

On October 10, 2025, the Art of Translation working group, led by Emma Lloyd from the Department of Comparative Literature, hosted a lunchtime gathering with Puerto Rican poet, translator, and educator Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, in conversation about speculative Caribbean poetry and the art of translation. The event, co-sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities, was organized by Coral Murphy Marcos and moderated by Claudia Martínez Rivera, both from the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.

Prof. Estelle Tarica has been appointed a Senior Fellow at the Townsend Center for Humanities for the 2025–26 academic year. Her current research examines the Guatemalan Revolution (1944-1954), a fascinating period of anti-fascist culture and politics that included strong support for the partition of Palestine. Studying this topic has given her new insights into the present moment.