Graduate Students

Jair Jáuregui Torres

Ph.D. Student

Jair is a PhD student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures. He received his BA in Spanish and Art History, with a minor in Education, from the University of California, Davis in 2021, while also working as a tutor and peer advisor for the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. His main research interest is the relationship between literature and the visual arts, including ekphrasis, iconicity, and art criticism, from Latin America mainly during the late 19th to the early 20th centuries.

Jonathan Jones-Edwards

Ph.D. Student

Jonathan Jones-Edwards is a PhD student in the Romance Languages and Literatures (RLL) program. He holds a BA in Foreign Languages with a concentration in Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese (2016) and a MA in Romance Languages and Literatures with a concentration in Spanish (2021) both from the University of Memphis. Prior to coming to Berkeley, he was an English-Spanish medical interpreter at Regional One Health in Memphis, TN. His current research interests include sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, language contact, as well as cross-linguistic studies of Romance and non-Romance...

Ana Luiza Kehdi

Ph.D. Student

Ana Luíza is a PhD student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work is situated in literary and cultural studies, with interests in twentieth-century and contemporary Brazilian literature and culture, Indigenous literatures, Ecocriticism, and Theories of Capitalism and Modernity. She holds an MA in Literary Theory and History, and a BA in Languages and Literatures from the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil.


During her master’s degree, funded by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), she...

Anna Knall

Ph.D. Student

Anna Knall is a PhD student in the Linguistics track of the Romance Languages and Literatures program at UC Berkeley. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Hispanic Linguistics and Political Science (2024) from the University of California, Berkeley, where she completed a senior thesis on grammatical gender assignment strategies among Spanish-English bilinguals during code-switching. Her current research interests focus on sociolinguistic aspects within diaspora Romanian communities, particularly how contact between Romanian and other Romance varieties influences the phonetic and morphosyntactic...

Shulin Liu

Ph.D. Student

New York University, BA with Honors in Linguistics

UC Berkeley, PhD student in Hispanic Linguistics
Research interests: Variationist sociolinguistics, quantitative sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, language variation and change, multilingual speech communities, contact linguistics, Galician linguistics, Spanish in contact, third wave sociolinguistics, social perception.

Ana Claudia Lopes

Ph.D. Student

Ana Claudia Simão de Oliveira Lopes is a Ph.D. student in Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and in the Critical Theory Program. She completed a B.A. in Comparative Literature at Berkeley, graduating with Highest Distinction in General Scholarship, and was awarded the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Fellowship for outstanding academic achievements. While completing her degree, she worked as a Research Apprentice on a project about pilgrimages in the Northeast of Brazil and wrote a thesis on comparative language structures in the works of Brazilian authors Osman Lins and Clarice Lispector. During the...

Benito López Romero

Graduate Student

Luis Amaya Madrid

Ph.D. Student

Luis Amaya Madrid is a PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He received his BA in Psychology and Linguistics from the University of Arizona and his MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the University of Guelph. He is interested in Latin American literature, Indigenous studies, and digital humanities.

Anahit Manoukian

Ph.D. Candidate

Anahit Manoukian is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese with a Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. Her research and teaching bridge the early modern and modern periods, with a particular emphasis on the long eighteenth century, identity and belonging, nation-building, imperial and intellectual history, transatlantic and comparative studies, and geopolitics.

Her dissertation “From Subjects to Citizens: The Construction of Civic Identity in Spain” traces the emergence of civic consciousness in Spain from its...

Claudia Martínez Rivera

Ph.D. Student

Claudia Martínez Rivera is a Puerto Rican PhD student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a Master of Arts in English Literature Specialized in Feminist and Gender Studies from the University of Ottawa, for which she completed a thesis titled Yo digo lo que me da la gana: Using Spanglish Translational Strategies to Redefine Puerto Rico in the Poetry of Roque Raquel Salas Rivera. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Her research interests include contemporary...