Graduate Students

Julian Vargo, Niko Schwarz, and Verónica Grajeda (HLL Linguistics) recently published a socioprosodic research study in Phonetica. The study is a collaborative investigation with peers in CS and Linguistics, titled "Identity and personality in the social perception of synthesized-voices: perceptions of OpenAI's text-to-speech technology." Spoiler: Human listeners readily ascribe real-world social characteristics to synthesized voices, demonstrating the importance of human experience in human-computer interaction and the deep entrenchment of social judgment in all kinds of communication,...

Anahit Manoukian, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, published an article titled, "Imperial Rivalries, Race, and the Limits of María Rosa de Gálvez's Antislavery Discourse" in Dieciocho. This paper situates María Rosa de Gálvez’s tragedy Zinda (1804) within its sociohistorical and cultural context—between the Haitian Revolution and the parliamentary debates at the Cortes of Cádiz—and argues that the play not only exposes Spanish anxieties about African Blackness, slavery, and colonialism but also anticipates the limits of liberal reform by...

We warmly congratulate Gabriel Lesser, who was awarded the Latin American Studies Association’s (LASA) Nineteenth Century Section Best Doctoral Dissertation Award. He received his PhD from the Spanish & Portuguese Department in 2025. His dissertation, “Hegemonic Humor: Racial Satires, Caricatures, and Nation Building in Nineteenth-Century Mexico and Brazil,” offers a compelling comparative analysis of how humor shaped racial imaginaries in nineteenth-century print culture, challenging established narratives of nation-building in Mexico and Brazil.

The evaluation committee wrote...

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...