News

Alejandro Múnera, PhD Candidate in Hispanic Languages & Literatures, was awarded the 2025 Philip Brett LGBT Studies Fellowship! 

The Philip Brett LGBT Fund is an endowment established in 2009 by members and friends of the UC Berkeley campus community to support graduate students working in LGBT Studies. It provides a monetary award to a UC Berkeley graduate student, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, conducting research related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer studies in any field or discipline.

On Thursday, April 3, 2025, the Iberian Studies Working Group at UC Berkeley screenedOlas de recuerdo (Memories of Salt), a 30-minute documentary directed by Naomi García Pasmanick in B-4 Dwinelle (Berkeley Language Center).

On Wednesday, March 12, 2025, in the Spanish and Portuguese Library at UC Berkeley, Afro-Cuban visual artist Alexis Esquivel gave a talk on his mixed media praxis and his understanding of Cuba as a socio-political, historical and cultural space.

UC Berkeley Librarian and Curator Liladhar Pendse, in collaboration with Spanish & Portuguese Graduate Students and Faculty, put together a new exhibit: "From Cartonera to Cordel”, displaying a collection of handmade chapbooks from Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba. This is a must-see exhibit, for its vibrance and variety in subject matter, format, and materials. The exhibit will be open to the public at Doe Library’s Bernice Layne Brown Gallery through August. 

Yareli Lopez, a UC Berkeley student and staff writer for The Daily Californian, published a piece in which she discusses "losing" and "reconnecting with" the Spanish language spoken in her household as she embarked on her academic journey at UC Berkeley. Lopez highlights the significance of taking Spanish language classes as a heritage speaker, the exposure to a community of Spanish speakers, and the space created in the classroom for self-knowledge and affirmation as a bilingual student. Read the full piece here: