People

Maxwell Moloney

Undergraduate Major Advisor

Maxwell earned a B.A. in French and Spanish from Marquette University and a M.A. in Spanish Literature From the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Schedule a 30-minute meeting here: https://calendar.app.google/pT75bPoPt54cDERm7

Estelle Tarica

Department Chair Estelle Tarica (PhD Comparative Literature, Cornell, 2000) is Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultures and a former Chair of the Latin American Studies Program at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching cover a diversity of topics: colonial and modern ideologies of race and nation in Latin America; Indigenous expression in the Andes and Mesoamerica; human rights discourses and memory debates after the Cold War; Jewish Latin America; and Holocaust consciousness in global perspective. Her first book,...

Niko Schwarz

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/

Tom McEnaney

Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literature and Culture. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Literature and serves on the Executive Committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media, and the Executive Board of UC Cuba. His work emphasizes the connections between Argentine, Cuban, and U.S. literature, the history of media and technology, sound studies, linguistic...

Justin Davidson

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...

Anahit Manoukian

Anahit Manoukian is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese with a Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. Her research and teaching interests include early modern and modern Iberian literatures and cultures, intellectual and imperial history, eighteenth-century theater, civic identity, geopolitics, and transatlantic studies. Her dissertation “From Subjects to Citizens: The Construction of Civic Identity in Spain” traces the emergence of civic consciousness in Spain from its beginnings in late seventeenth-century cultural...

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...

Emiliano Arizmendi-Castilla

I’m a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures. At Berkeley, I seek to map out the immigrant experience and increase access to higher education for marginalized communities. Originally from Mexico City, I’ve lived for ten years in Yucaipa, where I graduated from Crafton Hills College with an AA in Economics. After community college, I transferred to the University of Redlands. There, I completed a BA in Spanish and Political Science.

My research interests include post-Revolutionary Mexican literature, Magical Realism, Mexican and American politics, the...