PhD in Hispanic Languages & Literatures at University of California, Berkeley

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese offers the PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures (HLL) with three possible tracks: Hispanic and Latin American Literatures and Cultures, Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Cultures, and Hispanic Linguistics. All graduate students are required to develop broad expertise across a number of programmatic fields (literary genres, historical periods, cultural and social geographies, or linguistic sub-fields such as sociolinguistics, contact linguistics, phonetics and phonology, morphosyntax, second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, etc.) that ensure their ability to interact with colleagues and their competitiveness in the academic job market. The research specializations of our faculty and graduate students span all of these areas, and furthermore reflect most of the trends in contemporary scholarship, from philology, history of the book, and intersections of literature with material culture, through to aesthetics, the relationship of literature to visual culture, performance studies, language variation and change, data science and quantitative modeling, raciolinguistics, and language pedagogy. As students progress through our graduate program, they are expected to formulate their own theoretical approaches to research questions regarding an individually defined area of expertise.