We are a multi-disciplinary department whose scholarship is united by its mission to study Hispanic and Lusophone worlds. Our faculty engage in interdisciplinary research across periods and regions, from the Medieval to the contemporary period and covering Spain, Brazil, the Southern Cone, the Andes, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and the United States. We see these as part of larger networks, whether described as global Hispanic, transatlantic, or hemispheric Americas. Our department’s historic strength lies in questions of aesthetics and poetics. These topics continue to animate innovative scholarship in our department even as many faculty have moved towards a more expansive sets of fields: new media and digital arts, archives and paleography, visual culture, critical race studies, humanistic environmental studies, and U.S. Latinx studies, to name a few. Our research in linguistics is similarly oriented to border crossing given our focus on linguistic variation, with particular attention to Spanish-English bilingualism in the United States, Spanish-Catalan, Spanish-Quechua, and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish). We aim to legitimize contact (or non-monolingual) varieties of Spanish and encourage both researchers, as well as speakers in the actual speech community, to value their language as an authentic and rich Spanish variety.
Graduate students and faculty are involved in numerous Designated Emphases and certificate programs that enhance the academic landscape of the Berkeley campus, such as Critical Theory, Gender and Women’s Studies, Film and Media, New Media, Jewish Studies, Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, Language Revitalization, Applied Data Science and Cognitive Science. The department is a hub for interdisciplinary collaboration, with faculty members holding cross-appointments in other units and contributing to a range of centers and initiatives. Faculty and students participate in the Arts Research Center, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Berkeley Language Center. Our department contributes to the broader intellectual community by hosting regular events and collaborating with institutions like BAMPFA and City Light Books. Graduate students organize a regular research conference, produce a research journal, and lead numerous research working groups.