People

Gabriel Lesser

Gabriel Lesser is a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures. His dissertation is about racial satire, caricatures, and nation-building in nineteenth-century Mexico and Brazil. He received a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation grant to conduct archival research in 2023. Prior to starting his doctorate, Gabriel earned his B.A. in Hispanic Studies from Brown University and worked at the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. At UCB, he has taught classes in both Spanish and Portuguese.

Isaac McQuinn

Graduate Student 5117 Dwinelle Hall isaac_mcquinn@berkeley.edu Office Hours: M, W 12-1 pm

Luisina Gentile

Graduate Student 5118 Dwinelle gentile@berkeley.edu Office Hours: T 11-12 pm, Th 12:30-1:30 pm

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.

Michael Iarocci

Professor of Modern Spanish Literature and Culture (18th-21st centuries). Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities. Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. Comparative and Transatlantic Hispanic Studies. Literature and geopolitics. Aesthetics and ideology. Critical Theory. Visual culture.

Books

Enrique Gil y la genealogía de la lírica moderna (Juan de la Cuesta, 1999).

Properties of Modernity: Romantic Spain, Modern Europe and the Legacies of Empire (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006).

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Alejandra Decker

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.

Riley VanMeter

Graduate Student 5118 Dwinelle rileyvanmeter@berkeley.edu Office Hours: M, W 2-3 pm

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...

Nathaniel Wolfson

Nathaniel Wolfson is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Affiliated Faculty of the Program in Critical Theory. He teaches modern and contemporary Brazilian literature and visual culture in a comparative mode. His teaching and research focus on literature, visual art, media and critical theory.

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 canonical literature to popular culture.

His book Concrete Encoded: Poetry, Design, and the...

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,...

Victoria Robertson

Lecturer 5231 Dwinelle Hall vikaus@berkeley.edu Office Hours: W, Th 12-1 pm or by apptm.