People

Donna A. Southard

Lecturer, Assistant Director of Language Instruction

Donna A. Southard, Lecturer and Assistant Director of Language Instruction, holds a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley (2012) and a teaching degree from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She teaches and coordinates Spanish 3 and 4, while also occasionally teaching upper division literature courses. As a BLC Fellow, she has developed film modules for the language curriculum. Her research focuses on the interactions between graphic art and textual expression in pre-Civil War Spain. She is currently working on the Spanish translation of her...

Alex Saum-Pascual

Associate Professor

Alex Saum-Pascual is a (digital) poet, and professor. She is author of #Postweb! Crear con la máquina y en la red (Iberoamericana-Vervuert 2018) and numerous articles, special issues, and book chapters on digital media and literature in the Spanish-speaking world, being featured in The Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Digital Humanities Quarterly, among others. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from UC Berkeley's Hellman...

Candace Slater

Professor

Ph. D., Stanford University, 1975. (Professor) Research interests: Brazilian Literature and Culture; Latin American folk and popular traditions.

Justin Davidson

Associate Professor

Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015. Spanish Linguistics, Romance linguistics, SLATE (Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education).

Research Expertise and Interests

Sociolinguistics, contact linguistics and language contact, language variation and change, Romance linguistics, quantitative methods (statistics, variable rule analyses for sociolinguistics, and computer software for statistics), sociohistorical linguistics, sociophonetics, bilingualism, Catalan, Spanish, dialectal diversification, non-English language pedagogy.

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Verónica Grajeda

Ph.D. Student

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-...

Riley VanMeter

Ph.D. Student

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 variation, grammaticalization, quantitative and experimental methodology, sociolinguistics, comparative Romance linguistics/grammars, historical (socio-)linguistics, languages in contact, and corpus linguistics.

personal website:...

Shulin Liu

Ph.D. Student

New York University, BA with Honors in Linguistics

UC Berkeley, PhD student in Hispanic Linguistics
Research interests: Variationist sociolinguistics, quantitative sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, language variation and change, multilingual speech communities, contact linguistics, Galician linguistics, Spanish in contact, third wave sociolinguistics, social perception.

Niko Schwarz

Ph.D. Student
My name is Nikolai Andrés Schwarz-Acosta. I am a second-year Ph.D. student in Hispanic Languages and Literature on track 3 (the linguistics track). My research primarily focuses on phonetics and speech perception with an emphasis on perceptual adaptation. Please refer to my website for more information. Personal website: https://schwarzacosta.com/

Miroslava Guzmán Pérez

Ph.D. Candidate

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.

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.