Graduate Students

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…

Laura Barber

Ph.D. Student

Laura Barber is a third year PhD student in the department of Spanish and Portuguese with a Designated Emphasis (D.E.) in Critical Theory. She received her B.A. in Spanish and English from Indiana University and studied abroad at the University of Havana in 2020 where she completed a capstone project on feminism and popular culture in Cuba. She is broadly interested in debates around racial capitalism and internationalist solidarity between the U.S. and Cuba during the revolution. Her current research focuses on the poetry, essays, and personal documents of Lourdes Casal, an Afro-Cuban...

Derek Allen

Ph.D. Candidate

Derek Allen is a Ph.D. Candidate in Luso-Brazilian Literature and Culture with a Designated Emphasis in Film. His courses taught at UC Berkeley include: “Introduction to Portugal, Brazil, and other Portuguese-Speaking Cultures,” “Reading and Composition: Postcolonial Identities in Luso-African Literature and Film”, and “Intensive Portuguese for Spanish Speakers.” He is the recipient of the 2025 Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award.

He received his M.A. in Portuguese from Indiana University, where he was also an Associate Instructor of Spanish and Portuguese language...

Chloe Mauvais

Graduate Student

Chloé Mauvais is a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She holds an M.A. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley (2023) and a B.A. in International Relations and Spanish from NYU (2020). Chloé researches how Latin American artists and writers grapple in their work with changing ideas of nature and climate. She is especially interested in how changes in literary form reflect changing ecologies. She is currently tracking the epistemological differences in nature, climate, and the human evolving as a response to...

Verónica Grajeda

Ph.D. Student

I'm a PhD student in Hispanic Linguistics. My current research at Cal focuses on the phonetics and phonology of U.S. Spanish as well as language attitudes and ideologies of U.S. Spanish speakers. As a sociolinguist I seek to apply my findings toward validating U.S. Spanish and increasing its legitimacy in educational settings. I received my B.A. in French and Linguistics at UCLA and subsequently received an M.A. in Applied Linguistics at Teachers College, Columbia University. I spent the next 9 years teaching English as a second language, followed by Spanish and French in the California K-...

Riley VanMeter

Ph.D. Student

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.

personal website:...

Shulin Liu

Ph.D. Student

New York University, BA with Honors in Linguistics

UC Berkeley, PhD student in Hispanic Linguistics
Research interests: Variationist sociolinguistics, quantitative sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, language variation and change, multilingual speech communities, contact linguistics, Galician linguistics, Spanish in contact, third wave sociolinguistics, social perception.

Niko Schwarz

Ph.D. Student
My name is Nikolai Andrés Schwarz-Acosta. I am a second-year Ph.D. student in Hispanic Languages and Literature on track 3 (the linguistics track). My research primarily focuses on phonetics and speech perception with an emphasis on perceptual adaptation. Please refer to my website for more information. Personal website: https://schwarzacosta.com/

Miroslava Guzmán Pérez

Ph.D. Candidate

My name is Miroslava Guzmán Pérez. I am a third year PhD student in the department of Spanish and Portuguese. I obtained my Master of Arts in Hispanic Languages and Literatures here at Cal in May 2021. I had previously completed a triple major in Spanish, French, and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine in 2018. My research lies broadly in Colonial Mexico and Nahuatl. More specifically I am interested in the process of translation from oral stories and traditions into Spanish as well as pictographs into standard western signs.