Faculty

Arturo Dávila

Visiting Professor

ARTURO DÁVILA is the Chair of the Department of Modern Languages ​​at Laney College, Oakland, and the founder of the Latinx Cultural Center. He also teaches in the Summer Program in Mexico at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his doctorate in Romance Languages ​​and Literatures. He specializes in colonial literature (Amerindian perspectives on the conquest of Mexico) and contemporary Latin American and Chicano literature. He has received four poetry awards: La ciudad dormida (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, Mexico, 1995);...

Daylet Domínguez

Associate Professor

Daylet Domínguez (PhD, Princeton University) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley. She is a scholar of Caribbean and Latin American literature and culture, with research interests in Caribbean geopolitics, transnational networks, and hemispheric cultures; travel cultures, costumbrismo, and the intersections between literary and scientific traditions; empire, nation, and revolution; and slavery and plantation cultures.

Her first book, Ficciones etnográficas: literatura, ciencias sociales y proyectos...

Agustín de Jesús

Visiting Professor

Agustín De Jesús holds a Ph.D. in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and an M.A. in Spanish Language and Culture from the Universidad de Salamanca, Spain. He brings extensive teaching experience from diverse academic institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania and Hunter College.

Peer Reviewed Publications:

“Literatura cubana escrita desde New York: Exilio, isla y mujer en la poesía de Lourdes Gil”. Entre islas...

Brazilian Writers-in-Residence

Established in the late 1990s, the Brazilian Writers-in-Residence at the University of California, Berkeley has welcomed many of Brazil's most influential writers and artists for sustained periods of creative work, teaching, and intellectual exchange. While centered on literature and writing, the residency embraces the many ways language and textual practice intersect with other artistic forms, bringing to Berkeley novelists, poets, essayists, translators, and interdisciplinary artists whose work has profoundly shaped contemporary Brazilian cultural life. Over...

Victoria Robertson

Lecturer

Nathaniel Wolfson

Associate Professor

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...

Estelle Tarica

Department Chair, Professor

Department Chair Estelle Tarica (PhD Comparative Literature, Cornell, 2000) is Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultures and a former Chair of the Latin American Studies Program at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching cover a diversity of topics: colonial and modern ideologies of race and nation in Latin America; Indigenous expression in the Andes and Mesoamerica; human rights discourses and memory debates after the Cold War; Jewish Latin America; and Holocaust consciousness in global perspective. Her first book,...

Oscar Perea Rodriguez

Lecturer

Román Luján

Lecturer

Sarah Lease

Assistant Professor
Education

2026 Ph.D. Linguistics, University of New Mexico

2022 M.A. Spanish (Hispanic Linguistics), University of New Mexico

2020 B.A. Spanish Language, Literature, and Culture, Minor in Linguistics, University of Colorado Denver

Research interests

Usage-based theory, child language acquisition, bilingualism, language variation, language change, corpus linguistics, Spanish in the U.S., phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, quantitative methods...