Graduate Students

Marguerite Morlan

Ph.D. Student

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.

Lydia Millhon

Ph.D. Student

Lydia Millhon is a PhD student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley with a designated emphasis in New Media. She completed her M.A. in Latin American Studies from the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University and received her B.A. with Honors in Spanish at Wake Forest University. Interested in poetry and visual arts from mid-twentieth-century Cuba and Brazil, Lydia studies concrete art as a vehicle for transnational discourses of modernity, race, identity, and cultural production.

Luisina Gentile

Ph.D. Student

Luis Amaya Madrid

Ph.D. Student

Luis Amaya Madrid is a PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He received his BA in Psychology and Linguistics from the University of Arizona and his MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the University of Guelph. He is interested in Latin American literature, Indigenous studies, and digital humanities.

Liam Seeley

Ph.D. Student

Liam G. Seeley is a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. He holds an A.B. in Spanish & Portuguese Languages & Literatures from Princeton University. His research focuses on contemporary vegetal aesthetics, visual culture, and world-making in/beyond Latin America and Brazil. Drawing on decolonial feminist scholarship and his own involvement in seed farming and rematriation, he is especially interested in dream, breath, and seeds as sites of cosmopolitical sovereignty and resistance amidst colonial modernity.

Karol Alzate

Ph.D. Candidate

Karol Alzate Londoño is a PhD Candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese program at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her MA in Peacebuilding from La Universidad de los Andes in Colombia and completed her undergraduate degree in History and Literature at Harvard University. Prior to starting her PhD, Karol worked for various non-profit and political organizations, including the Colombian Truth Commission. Her work focuses on Black riverine geographies in the Caribbean and Pacific Coasts of Colombia.

Julián Vargo

Ph.D. Student

Julian Vargo is a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Linguistics.

His research interests include phonetics, phonology, language revitalization, language contact, and sociolinguistics. His work focuses on vowels, vowel dispersion, suprasegmental phonetics, and vocalic timing in several languages, including Spanish, Catalan, Ladino, and Kalaallisut.

Julian currently serves as a graduate student researcher for the Multilingual Hispanic Speech in California Corpus. He is the co-coordinator for UC Berkeley's Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group and is a researcher at the Script Encoding...

Jonathan Jones-Edwards

Ph.D. Student

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...

Jackson Ribler

Ph.D. Student

Jackson Ribler is a PhD student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures. Born in Miami, FL, he graduated from Virginia Tech with degrees in International Studies and Spanish. He earned a master’s in Spanish Literature and Cultural Studies from Georgetown University, where he wrote his qualifying paper “Wrestling with Conventions of Género: ‘Cassandro’ and the Queer Male Celebrity Biopic.” He later served as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at the UNAM Facultad de Estudios Superiores Acatlán in Naucalpan, Estado de México. His research focuses on the Mexican Dirty War and the New Left,...

Jair Jáuregui Torres

Ph.D. Student

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.