Welcome to our website
The Department of Spanish and Portuguese is a community of scholars that gathers faculty and students working across a wide range of themes and geographic areas. It counts with specialists in the fields of literature, culture, and linguistics.
Our faculty's and students' fields of interest traverse questions pertaining to the translation of languages and cultures, the ecology of representation, the poetics of landscape, and the politics of academic work - just to mention examples and issues that link the past to a demanding present.
Students will find
in our department a commitment to building approaches for the
understanding of movements of people and traveling cultures that
define the epistemological and ethical challenges of a century fraught
with war and misconception.
Cognizant of the importance knowledge of other cultures and languages will continue to have in the twenty-first century, the program fosters in-depth studies of the literatures and cultures of the Iberian, the Latin American, and the Lusophone worlds.
Never has the task of preparing students in the knowledge and sensibilities of other cultures, literatures, and languages been more relevant and pressing. Beyond a desire to define a trend in cultural, literary, and linguistic studies, students will find in the undergraduate and graduate programs in Spanish and Portuguese at Berkeley a group of scholars working in a wide range of topics, approaches, historical periods, and philosophical orientations.
Faculty and students work in Catalan, Nahuatl, Portuguese, Romance Studies, and Spanish. The programs are specially designed for highly motivated students with a passion for other languages, literatures and cultures, for imaginative approaches to these and for careful crossing of traditionally defined geographic, linguistic, and disciplinary borders.
José Rabasa, Chair
