Graduate Students

Karol Alzate Londoño is a PhD Candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese program at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her MA in Peacebuilding from La Universidad de los Andes in Colombia and completed her undergraduate degree in History and Literature at Harvard University. Prior to starting her PhD, Karol worked for various non-profit and political organizations, including the Colombian Truth Commission. Her work focuses on Black riverine geographies in the Caribbean and Pacific Coasts of Colombia.

Laura Barber is a third year PhD student in the department of Spanish and Portuguese with a Designated Emphasis (D.E.) in Critical Theory. She received her B.A. in Spanish and English from Indiana University and studied abroad at the University of Havana in 2020 where she completed a capstone project on feminism and popular culture in Cuba. She is broadly interested in debates around racial capitalism and internationalist solidarity between the U.S. and Cuba during the revolution. Her current research focuses on the poetry, essays, and personal documents of Lourdes Casal, an Afro-Cuban...

Alejandra Decker is a Ph.D candidate in Hispanic Languages & Literatures and a Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research is on 19th century Latin American and Latinx literatures, science, and technology, with a special focus on mining literature and scientific writing in postcolonial Mexico. She has taught Spanish language and literature courses for both heritage speakers and foreign language learners.

I'm a PhD student in Hispanic Linguistics. My current research at Cal focuses on the phonetics and phonology of U.S. Spanish as well as language attitudes and ideologies of U.S. Spanish speakers. As a sociolinguist I seek to apply my findings toward validating U.S. Spanish and increasing its legitimacy in educational settings. I received my B.A. in French and Linguistics at UCLA and subsequently received an M.A. in Applied Linguistics at Teachers College, Columbia University. I spent the next 9 years teaching English as a second language, followed by Spanish and French in the California K-...