News

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).

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese is thrilled to welcome Ricardo Aleixo to our department as the 2022 artist-in-residence. Ricardo will spend two weeks as resident artist of our department: visiting classes, giving talks, performing, meeting students and faculty and working on his own creative production.

Florencia Abbate (Buenos Aires, 1976) joins the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in her capacity as a Fulbright scholar and will be with us through late January 2022. In her native Argentina, she has earned a solid reputation as a creative writer (fiction and poetry) and cultural critic. She holds a doctorate in literature from Universidad de Buenos Aires and is currently a Professor of Philosophy of Gender at the Universidad de Ciencias Empresariales y Sociales.

Congratulations to Ben Papadopoulos (Hispanic Linguistics), whose recent work on language and gender was referenced in the Linguistic Society of America’s (LSA) Statement Against Linguistic Misgendering. Ben’s work focuses on the production and attitudes towards non-binary gender morphology in Spanish, and champions the LSA’s call for gender-inclusive language.

Congratulations to our colleague, Jhonni Carr, who has won an Extraordinary Teaching in Extraordinary Times Award. The awardees include individuals from 32 departments representing a range of disciplines and academic areas as well as teams composed of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate student instructors.