Graduate Students

Chloe Mauvais

Graduate Student

Chloé Mauvais is a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She holds an M.A. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley (2023) and a B.A. in International Relations and Spanish from NYU (2020). Chloé researches how Latin American artists and writers grapple in their work with changing ideas of nature and climate. She is especially interested in how changes in literary form reflect changing ecologies. She is currently tracking the epistemological differences in nature, climate, and the human evolving as a response to...

Isaac McQuinn

Graduate Student

Lydia Millhon

Ph.D. Student

Lydia Millhon is a PhD student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley with a designated emphasis in New Media. She completed her M.A. in Latin American Studies from the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University and received her B.A. with Honors in Spanish at Wake Forest University. Interested in poetry and visual arts from mid-twentieth-century Cuba and Brazil, Lydia studies concrete art as a vehicle for transnational discourses of modernity, race, identity, and cultural production.

Marguerite Morlan

Ph.D. Student

Marguerite Morlan is a Ph.D. student in the Romance Languages and Literatures program. She earned a B.A. in Spanish and a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Southern California, as well as an M.A. in Spanish Linguistics from New Mexico State University. Her research explores language attitudes and identity in the Catalan Countries. She employs mixed-methods approaches in both sociolinguistics and linguistic landscape studies.

Coral Murphy Marcos

Ph.D. Student

Coral Murphy Marcos is a PhD student in the Hispanic Languages and Literatures program. She holds a B.A. from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, where she studied Journalism. She completed a master’s degree in Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Her master’s thesis was published in Mother Jones magazine, where she wrote about the rise of a far-right political party in Puerto Rico. She has also written for The New York Times, The Associated Press, National Public Radio, The Guardian, El País, The Nation magazine, and other publications. Her research...

Jackson Ribler

Ph.D. Student

Jackson Ribler is a PhD student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures. Born in Miami, FL, he graduated from Virginia Tech with degrees in International Studies and Spanish. He earned a master’s in Spanish Literature and Cultural Studies from Georgetown University, where he wrote his qualifying paper “Wrestling with Conventions of Género: ‘Cassandro’ and the Queer Male Celebrity Biopic.” He later served as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at the UNAM Facultad de Estudios Superiores Acatlán in Naucalpan, Estado de México. His research focuses on the Mexican Dirty War and the New Left,...

Gabriela C. "Gabi" Rodríguez Lebrón

Ph.D. Student

Gabriela C. “Gabi” Rodríguez Lebrón is a PhD student in the Hispanic Languages and Literatures program. She holds a B.A. from Colgate University, where she studied Spanish Literature and History. She completed two theses, one on nature in Garcilaso de la Vega’s poetry (High Honors) and another on texts written by Medieval female mystics (Honors). Her research interests include, but are not limited to Garcilaso de la Vega, Renaissance lyric (specifically bucolic poetry across traditions), the literary representations of nature, the Early Modern period, the history of ideas, mythology and...

Niko Schwarz

Ph.D. Student
My name is Nikolai Andrés Schwarz-Acosta. I am a second-year Ph.D. student in Hispanic Languages and Literature on track 3 (the linguistics track). My research primarily focuses on phonetics and speech perception with an emphasis on perceptual adaptation. Please refer to my website for more information. Personal website: https://schwarzacosta.com/

Liam Seeley

Ph.D. Student

Liam G. Seeley is a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. He holds an A.B. in Spanish & Portuguese Languages & Literatures from Princeton University. His research focuses on contemporary vegetal aesthetics, visual culture, and world-making in/beyond Latin America and Brazil. Drawing on decolonial feminist scholarship and his own involvement in seed farming and rematriation, he is especially interested in dream, breath, and seeds as sites of cosmopolitical sovereignty and resistance amidst colonial modernity.

Angeli Valiente

Ph.D. Student

Angeli Valiente Franchini is a PhD student and a Chancellor Fellow in the Hispanic Languages and Literatures program. She completed a B.A. at UC Berkeley with majors in Comparative Literature and in Spanish and Portuguese (Highest Honors), along with a minor in Creative Writing. As an undergraduate, she was awarded the Tollefson Prize for her nonfiction piece “My Peruvian Face” (Ellipsis Art & Literature), which informed her honors thesis. Her research led her to the Amazon Jungle where she examined how national hegemonic narratives conceal the systemic oppression of minority groups...