Overview

The Romance Languages and Literatures (RLL) interdepartmental PhD program is a joint venture by the Departments of French, Italian Studies, and Spanish and Portuguese. It offers students a unique opportunity to work with distinguished faculty in all three departments as they take advantage of Berkeley's unmatched resources for comparative study of the literatures and linguistics of the Romance language family.

The program is a doctorate in three Romance languages and literatures taught in the Departments of French, Italian Studies, and Spanish and Portuguese, and prepared with emphasis in one of the languages (referred to as the “Primary” language). 

While RLL is an independent program, students are normally affiliated with the department of their primary language, which is referred to as the “Host” department. Students may opt for either the Literature track or the Linguistics track.

The mission of the RLL program is: (1) To take a multilingual approach to language and literature; (2) To combine literary and philological/linguistic study; (3) To offer flexibility in the design of students’ programs: the unity of a common heritage and common evolution of the Romance family allows diversity in topics and approaches; and (4) To train Romance scholars of linguistics, literature, and culture who can take jobs in Romance-language departments, single-language departments, or Linguistics departments.

Undergraduate Program

There is no undergraduate program in Romance Languages and Literatures.

Graduate Programs

Romance Languages and Literatures: PhD, with emphases in French, Italian, or Spanish
 

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Faculty

• French Faculty

• Italian Faculty

• Spanish and Portuguese Faculty

French 

Faculty

Deborah Anne Blocker, Associate Professor. Early modern French literature and history.
Research Profile

Karl A. Britto, Associate Professor. Africa, cultural studies, the Caribbean, literature, francophone literature, colonial and postcolonial literature, Vietnam, gender and identity.
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Eglantine L. Colon, Assistant Professor.

Suzanne Guerlac, Professor. Nationalism, literature, philosophy, 19th- and 20th-century literature, myths of literature and theory, contemporary cultural criticism.
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Timothy Hampton, Professor. Culture, politics, English, comparative literature, French, renaissance and early modern European culture, the romance languages, the ideology of literary genre, the literary construction of nationhood, the rhetoric of historiography.
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David Hult, Professor. Literary theory, medieval French literature, allegory, hermeneutics, text editing, French Studies.
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Richard G. Kern, Professor. Literacy, second language acquisition, writing, psycholinguistics, reading, French language, French linguistics, technology and education.
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Michael Lucey, Professor. Pragmatics, the novel, sexuality studies, comparative literature, French, French literature, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, British literature and culture, social and literary theory, cultural studies of music, studies of language in use, theories of practice, twentieth-century American literature.
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Susan Maslan, Associate Professor. French, early modern French literary, political history, the enlightenment, human rights.
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Mairi Mclaughlin, Associate Professor. French linguistics, Italian linguistics, romance linguistics, translation studies, history of French, History of Italian, History of the Romance Languages, language contact, History of the Press, Speech Reporting.
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Nicholas Paige, Professor. Cinema (French New Wave), 17th- and 18th-century French literature and culture, history and theory of the novel, quantitative literary history and digital humanities, aesthetics and image theory, subjectivity and autobiography.
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Debarati Sanyal, Professor. Violence, poetry, the relationship between literary form, politics in 19th-century France, the connection between performance, performativity, ethics in modernist texts.
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Thoraya S. Tlatli, Associate Professor. Francophone literature, colonial and postcolonial studies, literature and psychoanalysis, twentieth-century continental philosophy.
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Damon R. Young, Assistant Professor.

Lecturers

Maia L. Beyler-Noily, Lecturer.

Daniele Boucher, Lecturer.

Seda Chavdarian, Senior Lecturer.

Florence Costa, Lecturer.

Gabriel Flambard, Lecturer.

Michelle Koerner, Lecturer.

Leslie Martin, Lecturer.

Blanca Misse, Lecturer.

Vesna Rodic, Lecturer.

Rachel Shuh, Lecturer.

Nelly A. Timmons, Lecturer.

Emeritus Faculty

Esther Alder, Professor Emeritus.

Leo Bersani, Professor Emeritus.

Joseph J. Duggan, Professor Emeritus. French, medieval epic, romance, lyric poetry, the theory and practice of editing medieval texts, oral literature, theory of genres, the relationship between literature and social context.
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Ulysse Dutoit, Professor Emeritus.

Basil Guy, Professor Emeritus.

Leonard W. Johnson, Professor Emeritus.

Thomas M. Kavanagh, Professor Emeritus.

Irving Putter, Professor Emeritus.

Walter E. Rex, Professor Emeritus.

Ann Smock, Professor Emeritus. Poetry, French, France during World War II, the Algerian War, 20th-century writing by women, relations between literature and music, Jacques Roubaud, Danielle Collobert.
Research Profile

Italian Faculty

Faculty

Albert Russell Ascoli, Professor. Italy, national identity, literature and history, Dante, authorship and authority, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Petrarch, Boccaccio, epic and romance, Renaissance, early modern, Middle Ages.
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Steven Botterill, Associate Professor. Italian literature and culture, Dante.
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Mia Fuller, Associate Professor. Anthropology, Italy, fascism, urban design, architecture, Italian colonialism.
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Henrike Lange, Assistant Professor.

Diego Pirillo, Assistant Professor. Renaissance Europe, History of Books and Reading, history of political thought, History of Historiography.
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Barbara Spackman, Professor. Feminist theory, psychoanalysis, culture, fascism, gender studies, comparative literature, Italian studies, narrative, European decadence, travel writing.
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Lecturers

Soledad D. Anatrone, Lecturer.

Anna M. Bellezza, Lecturer.

Stanley W. Levers, Lecturer.

Mara Mauri Jacobsen, Lecturer.

Kate Noson, Lecturer.

Giuliana Perco, Lecturer.

Brandon Schneider, Lecturer.

Avy Valladares, Lecturer.

Visiting Faculty

Andrei N. Barashkov, Visiting Assistant Professor.

Emeritus Faculty

Gavriel Moses, Professor Emeritus. Violence, body, comparative literature, Italian studies, film studies, English literatures, philology, film making, Italian cinema history & genres, auteur effects in Antonioni Kieslowski & Rohmer, cultural objects in cinema, novels on film, love.
Research Profile

Spanish and Portuguese Faculty

Faculty

Emilie L. Bergmann, Professor. Early modern Spain, colonial Spanish America, Spanish literature, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, visual studies, gender and sexuality studies.
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Natalia Brizuela, Associate Professor. Spanish, Portuguese.
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Anthony J. Cascardi, Professor. English, comparative literature, literature, Spanish, Portuguese, philosophy, aesthetics, early modern literature, French, Spanish Baroque.
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Justin Davidson, Assistant Professor. Spanish linguistics, romance linguistics, contact linguistics, bilingualism, Catalan, sociophonetics, language variation and change, quantitative methods.
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Ivonne Del Valle, Associate Professor. Colonial period in México, internal colonialism in Mexico, Jesuits (Loyola, Acosta, Baegert), Baroque and Enlightenment from a colonial perspective, technology and environment, drainage of Mexico City lakes, Christianity and Pre-Hispanic religions.
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Daylet Dominguez, Assistant Professor. Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures.
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Michael Iarocci, Professor. Spanish, literature.
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Francine R. Masiello, Professor. Gender theory, culture, globalization, comparative literature, Spanish, Latin American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, comparative North and South literatures.
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Ignacio Navarrete, Professor. Spanish literature: poetry, poetic theory, narrative and culture, history of the book, Cervantes, Don Quixote, Medieval and Early Modern Spanish literature. Modern Spain.
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Alexandra Saum Pascual, Assistant Professor. Spain, electronic literature, contemporary literature, digital humanities, new media.
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Candace Slater, Professor. Spanish, Portuguese.
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Estelle Tarica, Associate Professor. Latin America, Mexico, race, nationalism, Spanish, mestizo, Indians, Andes, Bolivia, Peru, Holocaust, Quechua.
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Lecturers

Amelia R. Barili, Lecturer.

Duarte Manuel Carvalho Pinheiro, Lecturer.

Clelia Francesca Donovan, Lecturer.

Miriam Hernandez-Rodriguez, Lecturer.

Teresa A. Mcfarland, Lecturer.

David Menendez-Alvarez, Lecturer.

Elena B. Olsen, Lecturer.

Ana Belen Redondo Campillos, Lecturer.

Victoria Martinez Robertson, Lecturer.

Donna A. Southard, Lecturer.

Tanya Varela, Lecturer.

Emeritus Faculty

Arthur L. Askins, Professor Emeritus. Spanish, Portuguese.
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Milton M. Azevedo, Professor Emeritus. Linguistics, Spanish, Portuguese.
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Jerry R. Craddock, Professor Emeritus. Spanish, Portuguese.
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Dru Dougherty, Professor Emeritus. Poetry, stage history, Valle-Inclan, Spanish poetics, war and literature.
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Charles Faulhaber, Professor Emeritus. Medieval Spanish literature; medieval rhetoric; codicology, paleography; computerization of scholarly methodology.
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Louis A. Murillo, Professor Emeritus.

John H. R. Polt, Professor Emeritus. Spanish literature, 18th century, 19th century.
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Jose Rabasa, Professor Emeritus. Spanish, Portuguese.
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Julio Ramos, Professor Emeritus. Spanish, Portuguese.
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