Graduate Students

Riley VanMeter

Graduate Student 5118 Dwinelle rileyvanmeter@berkeley.edu Office Hours: M, W 10-11 am

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...

Anna Knall

Anna Knall is a PhD student in the Linguistics track of the Romance Languages and Literatures program at UC Berkeley. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Hispanic Linguistics and Political Science (2024) from the University of California, Berkeley, where she completed a senior thesis on grammatical gender assignment strategies among Spanish-English bilinguals during code-switching. Her current research interests focus on sociolinguistic aspects within diaspora Romanian communities, particularly how contact between Romanian and other Romance varieties influences the phonetic and...

Verónica Grajeda

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-...

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...

Luisina Gentile

Graduate Student 5115 Dwinelle gentile@berkeley.edu Office Hours: W, F 1:10-2:10 pm

Isaac McQuinn

Graduate Student 5117 Dwinelle Hall isaac_mcquinn@berkeley.edu Office Hours: T 12-1 pm, W 10-11 am

Jair Jáuregui Torres

Jair is a PhD student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures. He received his BA in Spanish and Art History, with a minor in Education, from the University of California, Davis in 2021, while also working as a tutor and peer advisor for the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. His main research interest is the relationship between literature and the visual arts, including ekphrasis, iconicity, and art criticism, from Latin America mainly during the late 19th to the early 20th centuries.

Chloe Berger

Graduate Student

Miroslava Guzmán Pérez

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.

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...