People
Faculty Roster - Specializations
Leopoldo Bernucci (Ph.D. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) is The Russell F. and Jean H. Fiddyment Chair in Latin American Studies. He has taught at various institutions, including Yale University, the University of Colorado, the University of São Paulo (Brazil), and the University of Texas at Austin. He is author, co-author, and editor of numerous essays and scholarly books on 19th- and 20th-century Spanish American and Brazilian literature and culture including: Historia de un malentendido (on Mario Vargas Llosa’s La guerra del fin del mundo), A imitação dos sentidos (on Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões), Hispanic America, Brazil, and the Caribbean: Comparative Approaches, Os sertões (annotated ed.), Discurso, Ciência e Controvérsia em Euclides da Cunha (ed.), Euclides da Cunha: Poesia Reunida, Un paraíso sospechoso (on J. E. Rivera’s La vorágine), and Benjamín Saldaña Rocca: prensa y denuncia en la Amazonía cauchera (on human rights issues in the Amazon during the early1900s). He has also worked on Colonial Latin American literature and historiography. He can be reached by email at lmbernucci@ucdavis.edu.
Advisees:
Leonardo Oliveira Silva
Leigh Houck
Carlos Torres Astocondor
Travis G. Bradley (Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University) is an Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics. His primary research interests include phonological theory, Judeo-Spanish linguistics, phonetic and phonological variation in Ibero-Romance and other languages, and historical Romance phonology. Other interests include second language acquisition and technology-enhanced language learning. Professor Bradley has published in Probus, Lingua, Estudios de fonética experimental, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, Southwest Journal of Linguistics, Lingua(gem), and the Journal of Educational Computing Research. He has contributed chapters to various books, including Fonética y fonología descriptivas de la lengua española, Optimality-Theoretic Studies in Spanish Phonology, Historical Romance Linguistics: Retrospective and Perspectives, Laboratory Approaches to Spanish Phonology, Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Romance Linguistics, and Romance Linguistics 2007, among others. Along with Rafael Núñez Cedeño and Sonia Colina, he co-edited Fonología generativa contemporánea de la lengua española (2a edición, Georgetown University Press, 2014). He can be reached by email at tgbradley@ucdavis.edu.
M. C. Colombi (Ph. D. University of California, Santa Barbara ) is a Professor of Spanish Linguistics at UC Davis. Her research interests include: educational linguistics, functional grammar and sociolinguistics with emphasis on Spanish in the United States. She is the President Elect of the International Systemic Functional Linguistics Association (2005-2008). Recent publications include: Mi lengua: Spanish as a Heritage Language in the U.S., coedited with Ana Roca (GUP:2003), Developing Advanced Literacy in First and Second Language, coedited with Mary Schleppegrell (LEA,2002); Palabra abierta, coauthored with Jill Pellettieri and Mabel Rodríguez (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), La enseñanza del español a hispanohablantes: praxis y teoría, coeditor with Francisco X. Alarcón (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). She can be reached by e-mail at cmcolombi@ucdavis.edu.
Robert McKee Irwin (Ph.D. New York University) is a Professor and Chancellor's Fellow. He specializes in Mexican and Latin American Cultural Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies; Border Studies/Interamerican Studies: especially 19th and early 20th centuries. He is the author of Mexican Masculinities (2003) and Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints: Cultural Icons of Mexico's Northwest Borderlands (2007); coeditor of Diccionario of estudios culturales latinoamericanos (2009); The Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, c. 1901 (2003); and Hispanisms and Homosexualities (1998). He is currently working on a collaborative project on the international reception of Mexican golden age cinema. He is cofounder and faculty cosponsor of the Latin@american Cultural Studies research cluster at UC Davis, and manages UC Davis's collaborative working agreement in Latin American cultural studies with the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. He is also the current Chair of the Modern Language Association's Mexican Cultural and Literary Studies discussion group. He can be reached by email at rmirwin@ucdavis.edu.
Nicholas R. Jones (Ph.D. NYU) is the author of the award-winning Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, May 2019) and co-editor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave, December 2018) and Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production (Routledge, January 2021) with Chad Leahy. Jones also co-edits the Routledge Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities book series with Derrick Higginbotham and his research has been generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Jones has also held visiting appointments at Georgetown University and New York University. Jones's scholarly and teaching interests cover early modern Iberia, the Ibero-Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds, and the early African Diaspora (1440-1700). He can be reached by e-mail at: nrjo@ucdavis.edu.
Advisees:
Michael Lazzara (Ph.D. Princeton University) is Professor of Latin American literature and cultural studies, a founding faculty member of the Program in Human Rights Studies, and affiliated faculty with the Designated Emphasis in Human Rights and the Graduate Group in Cultural Studies. He also serves as Associate Vice Provost for Academic Programs and Partnerships in Global Affairs. He specializes in contemporary narrative, literature of the Southern Cone, dictatorship and post-dictatorship cultural production, Latin American film, and memory studies. He is the author of Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory (2006), Luz Arce and Pinochet’s Chile: Testimony in the Aftermath of State Violence (2011), and Civil Obedience: The Poetics and Politics of Memory (2018), among other books. He is co-editor of Telling Ruins in Latin America (2009), with Vicky Unruh, Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millennium (2016), with María Guadalupe Arenillas, and Los futuros de la memoria: sujetos, políticas y epistemologías en disputa (2022). His current book project is titled “Desobedientes: Narratives by the Children of Perpetrators and Accomplices in Chile, Argentina, and Peru,” and he is working on an edited volume called “How the Military Remembers: Countermemories and the Challenges to Human Rights in Latin America.” He can be reached by email at mjlazzara@ucdavis.edu.
Advisees:
Daniel Coral
Arcadio Bolanos Acevedo
Maria Claudia Huerta Vera
Lizbeth de La Cruz Santana
Cristina Martínez-Carazo (Ph.D. University of California, Davis) is a Professor of Spanish Literature and a native of Spain. Her research and publications focus on Spanish culture and film, art history and 19th century and contemporary Spanish novel. She has published numerous articles and the following scholarly books: Almodóvar en la prensa de Estados Unidos (2013); De la visualidad literaria a la visualidad fílmica en La Regenta de Clarín (2006); Contra el olvido: El exilio español en Estados Unidos (Co-editor) (2009); Contemporary Spanish Fiction. Dictionary of Literary Biography (Co-editor) (2005); Hispanismo y cine. (Co-editor) (2007); Spain’s Multicultural Legacies (Co-editor) (2008). She has developed and directed several UC Davis Education Abroad programs in Spain. She is currently a visiting professor at the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo in Santander, Spain and a member of the Elon Seminar on Integrating Global Learning with the University Experience: Higher Impact Study Abroad (Elon University 2015-2017). She can be reached by email at cmmartinezcarazo@ucdavis.edu.
Advisees:
Georgina Oller Bosch
Juan García Cardona
Paula Plastic
Jessica Rodrigues Poletti
Robert Patrick Newcomb (Ph.D. Brown University) (he/him/his) is Professor of Luso-Brazilian Studies, affiliated faculty in the Program in Critical Theory, and founder and director of the UC Comparative Iberian Studies Working Group. He specializes in comparative Luso-Hispanic literary studies, in both the Latin American and Iberian contexts. His publications include the books Iberianism and Crisis: Spain and Portugal at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Toronto, 2018) and Nossa and Nuestra América: Inter-American Dialogues (Purdue, 2011), and the co-edited volumes Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, and Africa (Liverpool, 2019) and Beyond Tordesillas: Critical Essays in Comparative Luso-Hispanic Studies (Ohio State, 2017). He is also translator of Alfredo Bosi’s Brazil and the Dialectic of Colonization (Illinois, 2015), and of essays and newspaper chronicles by Machado de Assis. His current book project is Writing Out of Place: Dislocation and Transnational Lusophone Literature. Prof. Newcomb teaches graduate seminars and undergraduate course on Luso-Brazilian and Iberian/Latin American literary topics. He can be reached by email at rpnewcomb@ucdavis.edu.
Graduate advisees/co-advisees/:
Faith Blackhurst
Alba Marcé García
Leonardo de Oliveira Silva
Jonathan Peralta Gutiérrez
Jessica Rodrigues Poletti
Elena Ríos Ruíz
Morgan Smith
Ana Peluffo (Ph.D. New York University) is an Associate Professor of Latin American literature and cultures. Her areas or scholarly interest include nineteenth-century Latin American studies, gender, film and visual cultures. She is the author of Lágrimas Andinas: Sentimentalismo, género y virtud republicana en Clorinda Matto de Turner (Pittsburgh: ILLI, 2005), Pensar el Siglo XIX desde el siglo XXI: Nuevas miradas y lecturas (editor, 2009); and Masculinidades del siglo XIX en América Latina (co-edited with Ignacio Sánchez Prado, 2009). Her essays have appeared in journals such as “The Latin American Literary Review”, “A contracorriente”, “Revista Iberoamericana”, “Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana”, “Nómada”, “Chasqui”, and “Revista de estudios hispánicos”, among others, as well as in several critical collections. She is currently working on the politics of affect and emotion in Latin American literature and film. She can be reached by email at aopeluffo@ucdavis.edu.
Advisees:
Arcadio Bolanos Acevedo
Claudia Sanchez-Gutierrez (PhD, University of Salamanca) is an Associate Professor in Spanish Linguistics, specialized in Second Language Acquisition and Applied linguistics. Her research projects involve both qualitative and quantitative methods and explore varied aspects of Spanish language learning and teaching. For instance, she is one of the co-creators of the Corpus of Written Spanish-L2 and Heritage Speakers (COWS-L2H), a large corpus of texts written by thousands of students at different proficiency levels for a total of over a million words. The creation of the corpus resulted in a productive research agenda that ranges from analyses of lexical diversity to studies on tense-aspect development and NLP automatic error correction. In addition to her work on learner corpora, she leads several projects that look into Spanish language teachers' cognition. Specifically, she explores teachers' beliefs and practices on different aspects of language learning and teaching, such as online education, written feedback, preterit and imperfect teaching, or vocabulary teaching. Finally, she also does classroom research that aims at improving language teaching practices through the implementation of different pedagogical programs, which include the use of graded readers, the adoption of task-based and flipped classroom models, among others.
Advisees:
Paloma Fernandez-Mira
Diego Alins Breda
Cesar Hoyos Alvarez
Lani Lopez-Bastidas
Emily Celeste Vázquez Enríquez (Ph.D. Cornell University) is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at UC Davis. Her areas of specialization are 20th and 21st century Mexican, Central American and Latinx literatures and cultures; environmental humanities (animal studies & ecocriticism); border studies; and migration studies. Her first book project, titled Border Biomes Coexistence and Interference on American Migration Trails, theorizes the concept of border biomes to examine the relationships between human and nonhuman entities that take place in border settings. Her second book project focuses on the invasive species metaphor, which she explores in relation to discourses against migrants, paying special attention to environmental refugees. She can be reached at ecvazquez@ucdavis.edu
Advisees:
Brooke Kipling
Emeriti Faculty
Emilio Bejel (Ph.D. Florida State University), poet, critic, and narrator, was born in Cuba, and has lived in the United States since the 1960s. He received his B.A. from the University of Miami, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish and Spanish American literature from Florida State University (Tallahassee). He has published several books of literary and cultural criticism, among them José Martí: Images of Memory and Mourning; Buero Vallejo: lo social, lo moral y lo metafísico; Literatura de Nuestra América; La subversión de la semiótica; José Lezama Lima, Poet of the Image; and Gay Cuban Nation; as well as several poetry collections, the latest two are Casas deshabitadas and El libro regalado. He has also published two versions of an autobiographical narrative: The Write Way Home. A Cuban-American Story (translated into English by Professor Stephen Clark), El horizonte de mi piel (in Spanish), O Horizonte da minha Pele (in Portuguese). He can be reached by email at ebejel@ucdavis.edu
Robert J. Blake (Ph.D. University of Texas, Austin) is a professor of Spanish linguistics at UC Davis and founding director of the UC Language Consortium (http://uccllt.ucdavis.edu). He has published widely in Spanish linguistics on topics in the history of the language, syntax, and applied linguistics, and new technologies (CALL). In 2004, he became a member of the North American Academic of the Spanish Language, making him a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy. In 2008, Georgetown University Press published his book Brave New Digital Classroom; a second edition was released in 2013. He developed an online first-year Spanish course in Fall 2011 and helped to produce a similar online offering for Arabic. Currently, he is producing a second-year online course with other colleagues. In Fall 2013, Prof. Blake had the distinction of being named visiting professor in the Curso de Altos Estudios del Español at the University of Salamanca, Spain. He can be reached by email at rjblake@ucdavis.edu.
Adrienne L. Martín (Ph.D. Harvard University) is Professor of Golden Age Spanish Literature. She has published widely in Spain, Latin America and the U.S. on a variety of topics and genres in Golden Age literature, including Cervantes, humor, sexuality, erotic literature, lyric poetry, and animal studies. She is the author of Cervantes and the Burlesque Sonnet (1991), An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain (2008) and co-editor of Venus venerada: tradiciones eróticas de la literatura española (2006), Venus venerada II: Literatura erótica y modernidad en España (2007), Spain’s Multicultural Legacies. Studies in Honor of Samuel G. Armistead (2008), and Lope de Vega, El perro del hortelano (2011). She is currently writing a book on animals in early modern literature. She teaches Golden Age Lyric Poetry, Prose and Theater; Cervantes; Don Quijote; Women in Golden Age Literature; Erotic Literature; Drama and Performance. She can be reached by email at almartin@ucdavis.edu.
Department Chair
Graduate Advisors
Department Advisor (for signatures on forms and general information):
Discipline-specific Advisors:
- Travis Bradley (Linguistics)
- Michael Lazzara (Latin American Lit and Cultural Studies)
Graduate Program Committee
2021-2022
- Claudia Sanchez-Gutierrez, Chair
- Ana Peluffo (ex-officio)
- Robert P. Newcomb
- Nicholas Jones
- Emily Vazquez-Enriquez