Faculty

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...

Paulina León

Assistant Professor

Paulina León researches and teaches on the cultural history of early modern Spain and colonial Latin America, with a particular focus on plague literature and medical cultures. She is also interested in historiography, book history and material culture, autobiographical writing, and poetry.

She holds a B.A. in History from Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico City) and a Ph.D. in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian studies from the University of Chicago. Her work has been supported by numerous fellowships, including the John Carter Brown Library, the Franke Institute for the Humanities at...

Michael Iarocci

Professor

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).

The Art of Witnessing: Francisco de Goya's...

Miriam Hernandez Rodriguez

Lecturer, Director of the Spanish Language Program

Dr. Hernández-Rodríguez received her M.A. in Hispanic Studies with a concentration in applied linguistics from the University of Illinois at Chicago where she was a recipient of two teaching awards. She obtained her Ph.D. in Spanish Linguistics with a designated emphasis in Second Language Acquisition from the University of California, Davis (2011). Throughout her career, she has worked with Chicago’s Heritage Language Teacher CORPS teaching, training, and evaluating graduate student teachers. She has collaborated in the design and implementation of the bilingual teacher preparation...