People

Gabriela C. "Gabi" Rodríguez Lebrón

Ph.D. Student

Gabriela C. “Gabi” Rodríguez Lebrón is a PhD student in the Hispanic Languages and Literatures program. She holds a B.A. from Colgate University, where she studied Spanish Literature and History. She completed two theses, one on nature in Garcilaso de la Vega’s poetry (High Honors) and another on texts written by Medieval female mystics (Honors). Her research interests include, but are not limited to Garcilaso de la Vega, Renaissance lyric (specifically bucolic poetry across traditions), the literary representations of nature, the Early Modern period, the history of ideas, mythology and...

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/

Liam Seeley

Ph.D. Student

Liam G. Seeley is a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley, and a member of the Coletivo de Tradutores Berkeley-Brasil. He holds an A.B. in Spanish & Portuguese Languages & Literatures from Princeton University. His research focuses on atmospheric media and air in the de/composition of the colonial-modern Brazilian archive. He is also interested in mud, mourning, seeds, humming, thimbleberries, and the peculiar roundness of bumblebees.

Julián Vargo

Ph.D. Student
Julian Vargo is a Ph.D. student of Hispanic Linguistics. He is the project manager for the Multilingual Hispanic Speech in California Corpus, the manager of the Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley, and the co-coordinator for...

Nathaniel Wolfson

Associate Professor

Nathaniel's teaching and research focus on literature, visual art, media and critical theory, especially of Brazil and Latin America. Among his research interests are poetry and poetics, politics and aesthetics, translation, anthropology, critical media studies, and post-colonial theory. He is Affiliated Faculty of the Program in Critical Theory and the Berkeley Center for New Media.

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

Estelle Tarica

Department Chair, Professor

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,...

Oscar Perea Rodriguez

Lecturer

Román Luján

Lecturer

Sarah Lease

Assistant Professor
Education

2026 Ph.D. Linguistics, University of New Mexico

2022 M.A. Spanish (Hispanic Linguistics), University of New Mexico

2020 B.A. Spanish Language, Literature, and Culture, Minor in Linguistics, University of Colorado Denver

Research interests

Usage-based theory, child language acquisition, bilingualism, language variation, language change, corpus linguistics, Spanish in the U.S., phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, quantitative methods...

Paulina León

Assistant Professor

Paulina León researches and teaches on the cultural history of early modern Spain and colonial Latin America, with a particular focus on plague literature and medical cultures. She is also interested in historiography, book history and material culture, autobiographical writing, and poetry.

She holds a B.A. in History from Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico City) and a Ph.D. in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian studies from the University of Chicago. Her work has been supported by numerous fellowships, including the John Carter Brown Library, the Franke Institute for the Humanities at...