The Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley is pleased to announce Professor Justin Davidson as Director for the Program in Romance Languages and Literatures, effective July 1, 2023.
Davidson is an Associate Professor of Hispanic and Romance Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Davidon's research explores the linguistic and social variation present in Hispanic communities across the world, especially in multilingual communities in which Spanish is either a majority or minority language. Alongside extensively studying variability in the production of select sound features in Catalan-Spanish communities in Spain, his active research locally in California pertains to studying Spanish-English bilingualism.
Founded at Berkeley in 1926, the interdepartmental Ph.D. program in Romance Languages and Literatures (RLL) is a joint venture by the Departments of French, Italian Studies, and Spanish & Portuguese and offers students a unique opportunity to work with distinguished faculty in all three departments. The program boasts a long history of philological approaches to language, literature, and linguistics, and embraces more recent innovations in how students and faculty pursue interdisciplinary research and coursework.