Derek Allen is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley in the Luso-Brazilian Literature and Culture track with a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies. He received his M.A. in Portuguese from Indiana University in 2020, and his B.A. in Portuguese from Brigham Young University in 2014.
Mônica Gimenes (she/her) is a feminist researcher of contemporary Latin American literature and cultures. Her doctoral dissertation foregrounds the aesthetic dimensions of the political work combating feminicidal violence in recent novels and short stories from Brazil and Argentina. She is also a translator and an award-winning instructor of Portuguese and Spanish languages and literature. Mônica holds an M.A. in Spanish and a B.A. in Multimedia Studies: Journalism from Florida Atlantic University.
Luíza’s research centers the contemporary art practices of Indigenous, Black, and Brown artists from Latin America, and their diaspora in the United States, with a focus on how particular aesthetic practices articulate non-modern (non-western) knowledges and interrogate the concept of coloniality of gender—and its intrinsic hierarchies of racial categorization. Adopting abolitionist and decolonial frameworks in dialogue with Women of Color feminist methodologies, Luíza considers how art practices may reconceptualize the human as...
Gabriel Lesser is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Languages and Literatures. He studies humor in Latin American literary and visual culture. His dissertation is about racial satire, caricatures, and nation-building in nineteenth-century Mexico and Brazil. He received a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation grant to conduct archival research in 2023. Prior to starting his doctorate, Gabriel earned his B.A. in Hispanic Studies from Brown University and worked at the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. At UCB, he has taught classes in both Spanish and Portuguese.
Ana Claudia Simão de Oliveira Lopes is a Ph.D. student in Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and the Critical Theory Program. She completed a B.A. in Comparative Literature at Berkeley in 2021, receiving the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Fellowship for outstanding academic achievements. She is a co-coordinator of the Brazilian Studies Working Group at the Townsend Center for Humanities.
Isaac McQuinn is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He studies Brazilian literature of the 20th century, in particular the modernist period. This summer, Isaac will be conducting pre-dissertation research into Mário de Andrade in São Paulo.
Liam G. Seeley is a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. He holds an A.B. in Spanish & Portuguese Languages & Literatures from Princeton University. His research focuses on contemporary vegetal aesthetics, visual culture, and world-making in/beyond Brazil and Latin America. Drawing on decolonial feminist scholarship and his own involvement in seed farming and rematriation, he is especially interested in dream, breath, and seeds as sites of cosmopolitical sovereignty and resistance amidst colonial modernity.
