Graduate Students

HLL Linguistics students publish co-authored paper

May 15, 2026

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,...

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/phon-2025-0065/html

Anahit Manoukian

Ph.D. Candidate

Anahit Manoukian is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese with a Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. Her research and teaching bridge the early modern and modern periods, with a particular emphasis on the long eighteenth century, identity and belonging, nation-building, imperial and intellectual history, transatlantic and comparative studies, and geopolitics.

Her dissertation “From Subjects to Citizens: The Construction of Civic Identity in Spain” traces the emergence of civic consciousness in Spain from its...

Anahit Manoukian publishes in Dieciocho, journal dedicated to eighteenth-century studies in Spain and Latin America

May 4, 2026

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...

Riley VanMeter publishes article

May 15, 2026

Riley Vanmeter published an article titled "Translation and grammaticalization in 17th-Century Neapolitan: A comparative Romance analysis" in the proceedings of the 2026 Linguistic Society of America.

Article can be found linked below:

https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/PLSA/article/view/6…

Marguerite Morlan presents at WSS12 and the 20th International NACS Colloquium

May 15, 2026

Marguerite presented her research at the 12th International Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics and the 20th International Colloquium of the North American Catalan Society in April 2026. She shared findings from two experiments she carried out that elicited language attitudes toward Spanish and Catalan among locally raised Catalan participants.

Gabriel Lesser wins Best Doctoral Dissertation award from LASA’s Nineteenth Century Section

May 1, 2026

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...

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...