Graduate Students

Alejandro Múnera

Alejandro Múnera is a Ph.D. candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese Department and the Critical Theory Program. In 2023, Alejandro was an Erasmus Fellow at the Lateinamerika-Institute from the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany.

His research traverses modern literature, film and media, visual art, and critical theory from Spanish America, Brazil, and the Caribbean, mainly focusing on queer, trans, and feminist culture; disease and disability studies; and the genealogies of black, indigenous, and LGBT social movements in the Americas.

Alejandro’s dissertation,...

Jonathan Jones-Edwards

Jonathan Jones-Edwards is a PhD student in the Romance Languages and Literatures (RLL) program. He holds a BA in Foreign Languages with a concentration in Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese (2016) and a MA in Romance Languages and Literatures with a concentration in Spanish (2021) both from the University of Memphis. Prior to coming to Berkeley, he was an English-Spanish medical interpreter at Regional One Health in Memphis, TN. His current research interests include sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, language contact, as well as cross-linguistic studies of Romance and non-Romance...

Ben Papadopoulos

I am a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate and Graduate Student Instructor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. I am a sociolinguist with additional training in critical sociology. I graduated from UC Berkeley in 2018 with B.A.s in Linguistics and Spanish. My current research investigates features of gender in different languages in order to understand the connection between language and human identity. I am relatedly pursuing a Designated Emphasis in Gender and Women’s Studies. You may view the public-facing extension of my research, the Gender in Language Project...

Derek Allen

Derek Allen is a PhD student in Luso-Brazilian Literature and Culture. He received his MA in Portuguese from Indiana University in 2020, where he was also an Associate Instructor of Spanish and Portuguese. He received his BA in Portuguese from Brigham Young University in 2014, where he was awarded Outstanding Portuguese Major, and graduated with minors in English and Management, while also working as a research assistant for the Department of Plant Sciences. He first learned Portuguese while spending two years as a volunteer service representative in the Luso-African countries of Mozambique...

Riley VanMeter

Riley VanMeter is a Ph.D. Student in Romance Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. He holds an M.A. in Romance Languages (2023) and a B.A. in International Business and Spanish (2022, Summa cum laude) from The University of Alabama. His research interests include morphosyntactic change and variation, grammaticalization, quantitative and experimental methodology, sociolinguistics, comparative Romance linguistics/grammars, historical (socio-)linguistics, languages in contact, and corpus linguistics....

Anahit Manoukian

5115 Dwinelle

amanoukian@berkeley.edu

Office Hours: T 11-12, W 9-10 am

Ana Claudia Lopes

Ana Claudia Simão de Oliveira Lopes is a Ph.D. student in Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and in the Critical Theory Program. She completed a B.A. in Comparative Literature at Berkeley, graduating with Highest Distinction in General Scholarship, and was awarded the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Fellowship for outstanding academic achievements. While completing her degree, she worked as a Research Apprentice on a project about pilgrimages in the Northeast of Brazil and wrote a thesis on comparative language structures in the works of Brazilian authors Osman Lins and Clarice Lispector. During the...

Luis Barco

5115 Dwinelle Hall lbarco@berkeley.edu Office Hours: T 10-11, W 11:30-12:30

Luis Enrique Barco (him, his, él) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley. He holds an M.A. in Hispanic Languages & Literatures from UC Berkeley, a B.A in Spanish and a BA in Latin American Studies from the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include 20th and 21st century Latin American narrative, performance, and visual art; historical memory, truth...

Yesenia Blanco

yeseblanco@berkeley.edu

Delia Neyra Tercero

Delia Neyra Tercero is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. She holds an M.A. in Spanish from Berkeley (2018), a B.A. in English and a B.A. in Spanish from Saint Mary's College of California (2013, magna cum laude). Her research interests include 20th and 21st century Central American literature with an emphasis on poetry, women and gender studies and diaspora studies. Delia's dissertation examines contemporary Central American and U.S. Central American women's poetry and prose (2001-2018), and explores how these texts grapple with the aftermath of...