Faculty

Amir Effat

Lecturer

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.

Daniella Cádiz Bedini

Assistant Professor

Dani Cádiz Bedini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at UC Berkeley. She teaches and writes on literature of the Americas, literary exchanges, empire, political terror, and anticolonial activism. Her book project, tentatively titled Dream Awake: Reiterations of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Americas, examines diverse modes of translation that were harnessed as anti-imperialist work. A second book project looks to political terror and the gothic in Latin America.

Dani's writing and reviews have appeared or are...

Justin Davidson

Associate Professor

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 pedagogy.

...

Jhonni Carr

Lecturer of Spanish Linguistics

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 language access 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...

Thomaz Amancio

Assistant Professor

Thomaz Amancio researches and teaches Luso-Afro-Brazilian literatures and cultures. His work is particularly concerned with the dialogue between literature and the social sciences in connection to the countryside in Brazil. Other areas of interest include critical animal studies, the environmental humanities, and the cultural history of hunger.

Thomaz received a B.A. and an M.A. from Unicamp (Brazil) and a PhD in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies from the University of Chicago. He is a co-founder of the Saudade Working Group, an initiative...

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...

Alex Saum-Pascual

Associate Professor

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 Journal of Latin American 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's Hellman Fund...

Angeli Valiente Franchini Presents on the First Colloquium on Guaman Poma at University of Florida

March 6, 2026

Dr. Rocio Quispe Agnoli

Angeli joined 26 scholars from around the world on the First Colloquium on Guaman Poma at University of Florida, exploring the 1615 manuscript through the interdisciplinary lens of literature, art history, history, and archaeology.

https://people.clas.ufl.edu/paolauparela/guaman-poma-uf/

New book: "We're Having Much More Fun: Punk Archives for the Present from CBGB to Gilman and Beyond"

March 9, 2026

Stikky in Isocracy's confetti. Photo by Murray Bowles

In We're Having Much More Fun Judith A. Peraino and Tom McEnaney celebrate the ways punks have built and documented their own misfit collectives since the mid-1970s, assembling alternative worlds of riotous...

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501780325/were-having-much-more-fu…

Professor Alex Saum-Pascual Joins Global Experts in Spain to Address Gender Bias in AI at Government Summit

March 20, 2026

Professor Alex Saum-Pascual recently participated as a featured speaker in the international summit "El poder del trabajo en tiempos de algoritmos: Reinventando el empleo digno," a high-level event hosted in Madrid by the Spanish Ministry of Labor and Social Economy.

Held on March 4 and 5, 2026, under the leadership of Yolanda Díaz, the Second Vice President of the Government of Spain, the conference gathered global experts to address the critical intersection of labor rights and emerging AI technologies.

Professor Saum-Pascual contributed her expertise to a specialized round...

https://www.youtube.com/live/GUJEpzTp_Pc?t=12483s.