People

Jhonni Carr

Dr. Jhonni Carr holds a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles. She currently teaches in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley and was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor at UCLA. Specializing in Spanish Sociolinguistics, she investigates the power dynamics of languages in contact in the public space of Southern California and Mexico. She uses interdisciplinary methods to explore these areas’ signage (i.e. linguistic landscape) and residents’ attitudes toward the presence and absence of different...

Alejandro Múnera

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

His research traverses modern literature, film and media, 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.

Alejandro’s dissertation,...

Nathaniel Wolfson

Nathaniel Wolfson is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Affiliated Faculty of the Program in Critical Theory. He teaches Brazilian literature and visual culture in a comparative mode: exchanges between the Lusophone world, Latin America, Europe, and the United States. His teaching and research focus on literature, visual art, and philosophy, especially critical theory and media studies.

Wolfson teaches undergraduate courses on Brazilian culture and graduate courses on Brazil and Latin America. His teaching incorporates a wide range of materials and voices from...

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...

Derek Allen

Derek Allen is a PhD student in Luso-Brazilian Literature and Culture. He received his MA in Portuguese from Indiana University in 2020, where he was also an Associate Instructor of Spanish and Portuguese. He received his BA in Portuguese from Brigham Young University in 2014, where he was awarded Outstanding Portuguese Major, and graduated with minors in English and Management, while also working as a research assistant for the Department of Plant Sciences. He first learned Portuguese while spending two years as a volunteer service representative in the Luso-African countries of Mozambique...

Riley VanMeter

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....

Anna Rodas

Visiting Lecturer 5222 Dwinelle Hall arodas@berkeley.edu Office Hours: T, Th 11-12 pm

Ignacio Navarrete

Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Spanish literature, especially poetry, narrative, and poetics; literary theory. Ph. D., Indiana University, 1985. I have just finished a book on narrative culture c. 1520, as reflected in the printing of narrative works, ranging from saints’ lives to the Celestina. The project thus triangulates the history of the book, narrative theory, and close reading. Earlier research focused on Italo-Iberian cultural relations, and on a series of phenomena (Petrarchism, courtiership, narrative theory) that can be seen as metalanguages of an early modern...

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...

Amir Effat

Amir received his Ph.D. in Hispanic Language and Literature from Boston University in 2020. His dissertation On the Edge: Liminal Space in the Novels of Benito Pérez Galdós was honored with the award for Best Doctoral Thesis in 2020 by the Asociación Internacional de Galdosistas (AIG). After working as a lecturer in Northeastern University and Boston College, Amir is excited to start this new chapter of his life in California.