Graduate Students

Chloe Berger

Graduate Student

Claudia Martínez Rivera

Ph.D. Student

Claudia Martínez Rivera is a Puerto Rican PhD student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a Master of Arts in English Literature Specialized in Feminist and Gender Studies from the University of Ottawa, for which she completed a thesis titled Yo digo lo que me da la gana: Using Spanglish Translational Strategies to Redefine Puerto Rico in the Poetry of Roque Raquel Salas Rivera. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Her research interests include contemporary...

Benito López Romero

Graduate Student

Astur Agún Alvarez

Ph.D. Student

Astur is a PhD student, recipient of the Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study. Born in Asturias, Northern Spain, he holds a Double Major in Political Science and Sociology from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and a Master of Arts in Literary Studies from Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He is especially interested in narration and its different forms as fundamental to human life, as well as in potential reflections on an on-going chronotope contraction.

From a multidisciplinary approach, his current research mainly focuses on Spain and the contemporary cultural artifacts that...

Angeli Valiente

Ph.D. Student

Angeli Valiente Franchini is a PhD student and a Chancellor Fellow in the Hispanic Languages and Literatures program. She completed a B.A. at UC Berkeley with majors in Comparative Literature and in Spanish and Portuguese (Highest Honors), along with a minor in Creative Writing. As an undergraduate, she was awarded the Tollefson Prize for her nonfiction piece “My Peruvian Face” (Ellipsis Art & Literature), which informed her honors thesis. Her research led her to the Amazon Jungle where she examined how national hegemonic narratives conceal the systemic oppression of minority groups...

Anna Knall

Ph.D. Student

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 morphosyntactic...

Ana Luiza Kehdi

Ph.D. Student

Ana Luíza is a PhD student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work is situated in literary and cultural studies, with interests in twentieth-century and contemporary Brazilian literature and culture, Indigenous literatures, Ecocriticism, and Theories of Capitalism and Modernity. She holds an MA in Literary Theory and History, and a BA in Languages and Literatures from the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil.


During her master’s degree, funded by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), she...

Ana Claudia Lopes

Ph.D. Student

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...

Alejandra Decker

PhD Candidate

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.