Graduate Students

Gabriel Lesser

Gabriel Lesser is a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures. His dissertation is about racial satire, caricatures, and nation-building in nineteenth-century Mexico and Brazil. He received a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation grant to conduct archival research in 2023. Prior to starting his doctorate, Gabriel earned his B.A. in Hispanic Studies from Brown University and worked at the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. At UCB, he has taught classes in both Spanish and Portuguese.

Isaac McQuinn

Graduate Student 5117 Dwinelle Hall isaac_mcquinn@berkeley.edu Office Hours: M, W 12-1 pm

Luisina Gentile

Graduate Student 5118 Dwinelle gentile@berkeley.edu Office Hours: T 11-12 pm, Th 12:30-1:30 pm

Alejandra Decker

Alejandra Decker is a Ph.D candidate in Hispanic Languages & Literatures and a Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research is on 19th century Latin American and Latinx literatures, science, and technology, with a special focus on mining literature and scientific writing in postcolonial Mexico. She has taught Spanish language and literature courses for both heritage speakers and foreign language learners.

Riley VanMeter

Graduate Student 5118 Dwinelle rileyvanmeter@berkeley.edu Office Hours: M, W 2-3 pm

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...

Alejandro Múnera

Alejandro Múnera is a Ph.D. candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese Department and the Critical Theory Program. In the 2023-2024 academic year, Alejandro was an Erasmus Fellow at the Lateinamerika-Institute from the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany.

His research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary literature, 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.

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Marguerite Morlan

Marguerite Morlan is a Ph.D. student in the Romance Languages and Literatures program. She earned a B.A. in Spanish and a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Southern California, as well as an M.A. in Spanish Linguistics from New Mexico State University. Her research explores language attitudes and identity in the Catalan Countries. She employs mixed-methods approaches in both sociolinguistics and linguistic landscape studies.

Chloe Mauvais

5102 Dwinelle Hall chloe.mauvais@berkeley.edu Office Hours: M 9-10 am, Th 1-2 pm

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...

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...