Faculty

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...

Adam Mahler

Lecturer of Ladino email: amahl@berkeley.edu Office Hours: Tu, Th 12:45-1:45 pm via Zoom (appointments at https://calendly.com/amahler-g/berkeley-span109a-jwst102-office-hours-with-adam-mahler)

Román Luján

Lecturer 5212 Dwinelle Hall romanlujan@berkeley.edu Office Hours: M, W 1-2 pm

Amir Effat

Amir received his Ph.D. in Hispanic Language and Literature from Boston University in 2020. His dissertation On the Edge: Liminal Space in the Novels of Benito Pérez Galdós was honored with the award for Best Doctoral Thesis in 2020 by the Asociación Internacional de Galdosistas (AIG). After working as a lecturer in Northeastern University and Boston College, Amir is excited to start this new chapter of his life in California.

Michael Iarocci

Professor of Modern Spanish Literature and Culture (18th-21st centuries). Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities. Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. Comparative and Transatlantic Hispanic Studies. Literature and geopolitics. Aesthetics and ideology. Critical Theory. Visual culture.

Books

Enrique Gil y la genealogía de la lírica moderna (Juan de la Cuesta, 1999).

Properties of Modernity: Romantic Spain, Modern Europe and the Legacies of Empire (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006).

...

Nathaniel Wolfson

Nathaniel Wolfson is Assistant 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...