Faculty

Daniella Cádiz Bedini

Dani Cádiz Bedini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley. Her research centers on Latin American and hemispheric American literatures, literary exchanges, and anticolonial activism, with a focus on migrations, border crossings, and linguistic exchange. Her book project, tentatively titled Crossing the Americas: Empire, Race, and Translation in the Long Nineteenth Century, examines diverse modes of translation that were harnessed as anti-imperialist work in the Americas during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Dani's...

Nathaniel Wolfson

Nathaniel Wolfson is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Affiliated Faculty of the Program in Critical Theory. He teaches modern and contemporary Brazilian literature and visual culture in a comparative mode. His teaching and research focus on literature, visual art, media and critical theory.

Wolfson teaches undergraduate courses on Brazilian culture and graduate courses on Brazil and Latin America. His teaching incorporates a wide range of materials and voices from canonical literature to popular culture.

His book Concrete Encoded: Poetry, Design, and the...

Jhonni Carr

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 California, Mexico, and Brazil. She uses interdisciplinary methods to explore these areas’ signage (linguistic landscape) and residents’ attitudes toward the presence and absence of different languages. Dr. Carr has also published work related...

April 2 at noon: Berkeley Book Chat with Francine Masiello

February 28, 2025

April 2, 2025

Noon - 1 p.m. at The Townsend Center for the Humanities
Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720

In her debut novel, Francine Masiello (Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literature) weaves a story of small-time artists and crooks who, over the course of a century, wend their way from southern Italy to the anarchist enclaves of Paterson, New Jersey, and from fascist Italy during World War II to Buenos Aires after its “dirty war” of the 1980s....

Tom McEnaney

Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literature and Culture. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Literature and serves as the Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media, and on the Executive Board of UC Cuba. His work emphasizes the connections between Argentine, Cuban, and U.S. literature, the history of media and technology, sound studies, linguistic anthropology,...

"Translating Oral Traditions": Department Hosts Conversation with Pedro Cesarino and Katrina Dodson

February 21, 2025
Translating Oral Traditions

March 17, 5 - 7 p.m.

Spanish & Portuguese Library - 5125 Dwinelle Hall

This event is a public conversation on the topic of oral traditions and translation between translator Katrina Dodson (Visiting Professor, Spanish and Portuguese) and anthropologist and fiction author Pedro Cesarino ( Spanish and Portuguese’s 2025 Brazilian Writer-in-Resident). It is moderated by Natalia Brizuela and organized by Nathaniel Wolfson.

Katrina Dodson is the translator of The Complete Stories, by Clarice...

Justin Davidson

Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015. Spanish Linguistics, Romance linguistics, SLATE (Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education).

Research Expertise and Interests

Sociolinguistics, contact linguistics and language contact, language variation and change, Romance linguistics, quantitative methods (statistics, variable rule analyses for sociolinguistics, and computer software for statistics), sociohistorical linguistics, sociophonetics, bilingualism, Catalan, Spanish, dialectal diversification, non-English language...

Alex Saum-Pascual

Alex Saum-Pascual is a (digital) poet, and professor. She is author of #Postweb! Crear con la máquina y en la red (Iberoamericana-Vervuert 2018) and numerous articles, special issues, and book chapters on digital media and literature in the Spanish-speaking world, being featured in The Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Digital Humanities Quarterly, among others. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from UC Berkeley...