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Roque Raquel Salas Rivera visits UC Berkeley to discuss speculative Caribbean poetry and the art of translation

October 13, 2025

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.

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet, educator, and translator of...

Prof. Saum-Pascual performs digital poetry at the Alhambra, Spain

October 21, 2025

Prof. Saum-Pascual performed her poetic work Traceroute Poems - segundo viaje alongside Mario Santamaría at Cultur_ALH, Encuentro Internacional de Cultura Literaria de La Alhambra, Spain. See the full video of the performance here.

cultur_ALH, coordinated by Ana Gallego Cuiñas and Patricia Escalona, brought together international figures such as Salman Rushdie, Mariana Enríquez, Camila Sosa Villada, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Yung Beef for a program that merged literature, performance...

Professor Estelle Tarica appointed a Townsend Senior Fellow

September 18, 2025

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.

https://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/fellows/estelle-tarica

Jhonni Carr receives The Arts & Humanities Teaching Award

May 15, 2025

The Department of Spanish & Portuguese is pleased to announce that Dr. Jhonni Carr has been awarded The Arts & Humanities Teaching Award in recognition of her extraordinary dedication to undergraduate student teaching.

Dr. Jhonni Carr holds a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles. She teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley. Specializing in Spanish Sociolinguistics, she investigates linguistic social justice and the power dynamics of displayed languages in the public space of...

Spanish and Portuguese Hosts Eulàlia Miralles Jori in partnership with the Institut Ramon Llull

March 11, 2025

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese welcomes Eulàlia Miralles as part of our on going collaboration with the Institut Ramon Llull. Prof. Miralles specializes on literary culture from the 15th to 19th centuries, especially non-fiction works like historiography, chronicles, diaries, and memoirs, with an emphasis on the Baroque period. Her reserach interests expand from textual criticism (Catalan, Spanish, and Latin) to cultural history, political literature, Catalan identity, and gender studies, focusing in...

Alejandro Múnera was awarded the 2025 Philip Brett LGBT Studies Fellowship

April 11, 2025

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.

Alejandro's...

Alumna Naomi García Pasmanick (‘15) Returns to Campus for Screening of Her Documentary "Olas de recuerdo"

April 8, 2025
Anahit Manoukian

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). Pasmanick, an alumna of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese (UC Berkeley ‘15), conducted a series of intimate interviews in 2019 with her Galician family members, reflecting on...

Lydia Millhon's Research Trip at the Rafael Soriano Foundation

April 4, 2025
Lydia Millhon

During the first week of January 2025, I was invited to research at the Rafael Soriano Foundation in Miami, Florida. The daughter of Rafael Soriano, and director of the Rafael Soriano Foundation, Hortensia Soriano welcomed me to the foundation and organized my stay next-door at the original Soriano household and studio in Miami. With various connections to collections, museums, scholars, artists, and universities, and influential board members like Lisa Faquin, the Rafael Soriano Foundation is an interdisciplinary organization that contributes not only to Soriano and his...

Exchanges with Afro-Cuban Visual Artist, Alexis Esquivel

April 4, 2025

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. Titled, “El desafío de pintar la historia” or “The Challenge of Painting History,” this event was organized by Elena Schneider in the Department of History and in collaboration with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley. The work of Alexis Esquivel has...

From Cartonera to Cordel: a new Latin American book art Library exhibit at Doe Library

March 24, 2025

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.

For more information...