Research Faculty

Brazilian Writers-in-Residence

Established in the late 1990s, the Brazilian Writers-in-Residence at the University of California, Berkeley has welcomed many of Brazil's most influential writers and artists for sustained periods of creative work, teaching, and intellectual exchange. While centered on literature and writing, the residency embraces the many ways language and textual practice intersect with other artistic forms, bringing to Berkeley novelists, poets, essayists, translators, and interdisciplinary artists whose work has profoundly shaped contemporary Brazilian cultural life. Over...

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...

Research Community

Daniella Cádiz Bedini

Assistant Professor

Dani Cádiz Bedini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at UC Berkeley. She teaches and writes on literature of the Americas, literary exchanges, empire, political terror, and anticolonial activism. Her book project, tentatively titled Dream Awake: Reiterations of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Americas, examines diverse modes of translation that were harnessed as anti-imperialist work. A second book project looks to political terror and the gothic in Latin America.

Dani's writing and reviews have appeared or are...

Thomaz Amancio

Assistant Professor

Thomaz Amancio researches and teaches Luso-Afro-Brazilian literatures and cultures. His work is particularly concerned with the dialogue between literature and the social sciences in connection to the countryside in Brazil. Other areas of interest include critical animal studies, the environmental humanities, and the cultural history of hunger.

Thomaz received a B.A. and an M.A. from Unicamp (Brazil) and a PhD in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies from the University of Chicago. He is a co-founder of the Saudade Working Group, an initiative...

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...

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.