People

Astur Agún Alvarez

Astur is a first-year PhD student, recipient of the Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study. Born in Asturias, Northern Spain, he holds a Double Major in Political Science and Sociology from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and a Master of Arts in Literary Studies from Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He is especially interested in narration and its different forms as fundamental to human life, as well as in potential reflections on an on-going chronotope contraction.

From a multidisciplinary approach, his current research mainly focuses on Spain and the contemporary cultural...

Angeli Valiente

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...

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...

Claudia Martínez Rivera

Graduate Student 5118 Dwinelle Hall cpmartinezr@berkeley.edu

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...

Julián Vargo

Full academic website here

Julian Vargo is a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Linguistics.

His research interests include phonetics, phonology, language revitalization, language contact, and sociolinguistics. His work focuses on vowels, vowel dispersion, suprasegmental phonetics, and vocalic timing in several languages, including Spanish, Catalan, Ladino, and Kalaallisut.

Julian currently serves as a graduate student researcher for the Multilingual Hispanic Speech in California Corpus. He is the...

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...

Laura Barber

5116 Dwinelle Hall laura_barber@berkeley.edu Office Hours: M, T 11-12 pm

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...

Nathaniel Wolfson

Nathaniel's teaching and research focus on literature, visual art, media and critical theory, especially of Brazil and Latin America. Among his research interests are poetry and poetics, politics and aesthetics, translation, anthropology, critical media studies, and post-colonial theory. He is Affiliated Faculty of the Program in Critical Theory and the Berkeley Center for New Media.

His book Concrete Encoded: Poetry, Design, and the Cybernetic Imaginary in Brazil,...

Raúl Coronado

Raúl Coronado is an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. His teaching and research interests are in Latina/o literary and intellectual history, from the colonial period to the 1940s. In a sense, this field and period allow—indeed force—us to rethink the literature of the Americas in a transnational, hemispheric framework. That is, Latina/o literature has usually been described as a twentieth-century phenomenon, emerging for the most part during the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 70s. Yet a return to the literary-historical archive reveals a quite...