Research Faculty

Tom McEnaney

Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literature and Culture. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Literature and serves as the Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media, and on the Executive Board of UC Cuba. His research emphasizes the connections between Argentine, Cuban, and U.S. literature, the history of media and technology, sound studies, linguistic...

Paulina León

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...

Daniella Cádiz Bedini

Dani Cádiz Bedini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley. Her research centers on Latin American and hemispheric American literatures, literary exchanges, and anticolonial activism, with a focus on migrations, border crossings, and linguistic exchange. Her book project, tentatively titled Crossing the Americas: Empire, Race, and Translation in the Long Nineteenth Century, examines diverse modes of translation that were harnessed as anti-imperialist work in the Americas during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Dani's...

Nathaniel Wolfson

Nathaniel Wolfson is Associate 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...

Justin Davidson

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...

Alex Saum-Pascual

Alex Saum-Pascual is a (digital) poet, and professor. She is author of #Postweb! Crear con la máquina y en la red (Iberoamericana-Vervuert 2018) and numerous articles, special issues, and book chapters on digital media and literature in the Spanish-speaking world, being featured in The Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Digital Humanities Quarterly, among others. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from UC Berkeley...

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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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,...

Daylet Domínguez

Daylet Domínguez (PhD Princeton University) is an Associate Professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department of UC Berkeley. She is a scholar of Caribbean and Latin American literature and culture, with special emphasis on travel cultures and costumbrismo; empire, nation and revolution; slavery, race and colonialism, among other topics. Her book, Ficciones etnográficas: literatura, ciencias sociales y proyectos nacionales en el Caribe hispano del siglo XIX (Iberoamericana 2021), studies the interplay of literature and science in nineteenth century Hispanic Caribbean. It...

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, ...