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HLL Linguistics students publish co-authored paper

May 15, 2026

Julian Vargo, Niko Schwarz, and Verónica Grajeda (HLL Linguistics) recently published a socioprosodic research study in Phonetica. The study is a collaborative investigation with peers in CS and Linguistics, titled "Identity and personality in the social perception of synthesized-voices: perceptions of OpenAI's text-to-speech technology." Spoiler: Human listeners readily ascribe real-world social characteristics to synthesized voices, demonstrating the importance of human experience in human-computer interaction and the deep entrenchment of social judgment in all kinds of communication,...

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/phon-2025-0065/html

Anahit Manoukian publishes in Dieciocho, journal dedicated to eighteenth-century studies in Spain and Latin America

May 4, 2026

Anahit Manoukian, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, published an article titled, "Imperial Rivalries, Race, and the Limits of María Rosa de Gálvez's Antislavery Discourse" in Dieciocho. This paper situates María Rosa de Gálvez’s tragedy Zinda (1804) within its sociohistorical and cultural context—between the Haitian Revolution and the parliamentary debates at the Cortes of Cádiz—and argues that the play not only exposes Spanish anxieties about African Blackness, slavery, and colonialism but also anticipates the limits of liberal reform by...

Riley VanMeter publishes article

May 15, 2026

Riley Vanmeter published an article titled "Translation and grammaticalization in 17th-Century Neapolitan: A comparative Romance analysis" in the proceedings of the 2026 Linguistic Society of America.

Article can be found linked below:

https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/PLSA/article/view/6…

Marguerite Morlan presents at WSS12 and the 20th International NACS Colloquium

May 15, 2026

Marguerite presented her research at the 12th International Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics and the 20th International Colloquium of the North American Catalan Society in April 2026. She shared findings from two experiments she carried out that elicited language attitudes toward Spanish and Catalan among locally raised Catalan participants.

Gabriel Lesser wins Best Doctoral Dissertation award from LASA’s Nineteenth Century Section

May 1, 2026

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.

The evaluation committee wrote...

Congratulations to Jhonni Carr!

March 25, 2026

¡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.

Angeli Valiente Franchini Presents on the First Colloquium on Guaman Poma at University of Florida

March 6, 2026

Dr. Rocio Quispe Agnoli

Angeli joined 26 scholars from around the world on the First Colloquium on Guaman Poma at University of Florida, exploring the 1615 manuscript through the interdisciplinary lens of literature, art history, history, and archaeology.

https://people.clas.ufl.edu/paolauparela/guaman-poma-uf/

New book: "We're Having Much More Fun: Punk Archives for the Present from CBGB to Gilman and Beyond"

March 9, 2026

Stikky in Isocracy's confetti. Photo by Murray Bowles

In We're Having Much More Fun Judith A. Peraino and Tom McEnaney celebrate the ways punks have built and documented their own misfit collectives since the mid-1970s, assembling alternative worlds of riotous...

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501780325/were-having-much-more-fu…

Professor Alex Saum-Pascual Joins Global Experts in Spain to Address Gender Bias in AI at Government Summit

March 20, 2026

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.

Professor Saum-Pascual contributed her expertise to a specialized round...

https://www.youtube.com/live/GUJEpzTp_Pc?t=12483s.

Remembering Professor Milton Azevedo

March 11, 2026

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.

His research interests focused on the Ibero-Romance languages,...