People

Astur Agún Alvarez

Ph.D. Student

Astur is a PhD student, recipient of the Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study. Born in Asturias, Northern Spain, he holds a Double Major in Political Science and Sociology from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and a Master of Arts in Literary Studies from Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He is especially interested in narration and its different forms as fundamental to human life, as well as in potential reflections on an on-going chronotope contraction.

From a multidisciplinary approach, his current research mainly focuses on Spain and the contemporary cultural artifacts that...

Graduate Student Conference

Spring 2026 - "In-Betweenness" April 16th - 17th

This two-day symposium, organized by our graduate students, seeks to explore the concept of “in-betweenness” as a space of transition, negotiation, and possibility across linguistic, cultural, medial, and disciplinary boundaries. Bringing together scholars from diverse fields, panelists will examine how these liminal positions challenge and reshape dominant frameworks of knowledge.

In line with this year’s theme, we are also excited to welcome Abel Cruz (Hispanic Linguistics and Bilingualism, Santa Clara...

Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies

The Department of Spanish & Portuguese is proud to support two major international publishing initiatives, providing our students with opportunities to engage with cutting-edge academic scholarship and digital publishing.

Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies (JSCS)

The Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies is a leading, international peer-reviewed humanities journal that explores cultural expression and social practices linked to the nations...

Justin Davidson

Associate Professor

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 pedagogy.

...

Maxwell Moloney

Undergraduate Advisor

PORTFOLIO: Undergraduate student guidance and orientation; major, double major, and minor planning and declaration; study abroad course and requirements planning. Instructor support including enrollment management, course scheduling, room reservations. Course Catalog and Academic Guide updates.

Maxwell earned a B.A. in French and Spanish from Marquette University in 2018 and a M.A. in Spanish Literature From the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2020.

Angeli Valiente Franchini Presents on the First Colloquium on Guaman Poma at University of Florida

March 6, 2026

Dr. Rocio Quispe Agnoli

Angeli joined 26 scholars from around the world on the First Colloquium on Guaman Poma at University of Florida, exploring the 1615 manuscript through the interdisciplinary lens of literature, art history, history, and archaeology.

https://people.clas.ufl.edu/paolauparela/guaman-poma-uf/

New book: "We're Having Much More Fun: Punk Archives for the Present from CBGB to Gilman and Beyond"

March 9, 2026

Stikky in Isocracy's confetti. Photo by Murray Bowles

In We're Having Much More Fun Judith A. Peraino and Tom McEnaney celebrate the ways punks have built and documented their own misfit collectives since the mid-1970s, assembling alternative worlds of riotous...

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501780325/were-having-much-more-fu…

Professor Alex Saum-Pascual Joins Global Experts in Spain to Address Gender Bias in AI at Government Summit

March 20, 2026

Professor Alex Saum-Pascual recently participated as a featured speaker in the international summit "El poder del trabajo en tiempos de algoritmos: Reinventando el empleo digno," a high-level event hosted in Madrid by the Spanish Ministry of Labor and Social Economy.

Held on March 4 and 5, 2026, under the leadership of Yolanda Díaz, the Second Vice President of the Government of Spain, the conference gathered global experts to address the critical intersection of labor rights and emerging AI technologies.

Professor Saum-Pascual contributed her expertise to a specialized round...

https://www.youtube.com/live/GUJEpzTp_Pc?t=12483s.

Laura Barber

Ph.D. Student

Laura Barber is a third year PhD student in the department of Spanish and Portuguese with a Designated Emphasis (D.E.) in Critical Theory. She received her B.A. in Spanish and English from Indiana University and studied abroad at the University of Havana in 2020 where she completed a capstone project on feminism and popular culture in Cuba. She is broadly interested in debates around racial capitalism and internationalist solidarity between the U.S. and Cuba during the revolution. Her current research focuses on the poetry, essays, and personal documents of Lourdes Casal, an Afro-Cuban...

Chloe Mauvais

Graduate Student

Chloé Mauvais is a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She holds an M.A. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley (2023) and a B.A. in International Relations and Spanish from NYU (2020). Chloé researches how Latin American artists and writers grapple in their work with changing ideas of nature and climate. She is especially interested in how changes in literary form reflect changing ecologies. She is currently tracking the epistemological differences in nature, climate, and the human evolving as a response to...