People

Román Luján

Lecturer 5212 Dwinelle Hall romanlujan@berkeley.edu Office Hours: T, Th 11-12 pm

Riley VanMeter

Graduate Student 5118 Dwinelle rileyvanmeter@berkeley.edu Office Hours: M, W 10-11 am

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...

Clélia Donovan

Senior Lecturer Director of the Portuguese Language Program 5220 Dwinelle Hall cleliadonovan@berkeley.edu Office Hours: W 2-3 pm, F 1:30-2:30 am or by apptm.

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...

Verónica Grajeda

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-...

Donna A. Southard

Lecturer and Assistant Director of Language Instruction. She 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 dissertation, Francisco Rivero Gil: A...

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...

Luisina Gentile

Graduate Student 5115 Dwinelle gentile@berkeley.edu Office Hours: W, F 1:10-2:10 pm

Isaac McQuinn

Graduate Student 5117 Dwinelle Hall isaac_mcquinn@berkeley.edu Office Hours: T 12-1 pm, W 10-11 am

Natalia Brizuela

Natalia's work focuses on photography, film and contemporary art, critical theory and aesthetics of both Spanish America and Brazil. She is the author of two books on photography. The first, Fotografia e Império. Paisagens para um Brasil Moderno (Cia das Letras, 2012) is a study of 19th Century photography in Brasil in its relationship to modern state formation, nationalism, modernization and race. The second, ...