This course studies contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean in literature and visual arts. Placing emphasis on the changing relationships between aesthetics and politics, it analyzes literary and visual styles that emerge with new forms of imagining the relations between culture and politics while enacting different power relations and cultural dynamics. We will engage with visual works from the Art Museum and will hold some classes at the study rooms. Class taught in English; readings and written assignments can be done in English or Spanish.

An overview of three of the most influential writers in the twentieth century, focusing on selected masterpieces. All three were fascinated by similar topics: dreams and memory; sexuality; Judaism. All three lived during traumatic historical periods. Proust during WWI; Freud during WWII; and Borges during Peronismo. Seminar will explore the relationship between literature modernism, politics, and religion.

This course explores Latin American and Caribbean culture and its connections with Europe and Africa through references to witches, witchcraft, and other forms of religion and power exercised by women, including practices from Santería, Palo Monte and other Afro-Caribbean religions. With a wide lens on how many women and queer bodies have been considered deviants, dangerous, and deemed punishable, this class will look at how colonialism and its aftermath shaped discourses around religion in the Americas, and how legal documents, visual arts, film, novels, and theater, have represented and contested those discourses and bodies.

SPA 101 covers the basic structures and vocabulary of the Spanish language at elementary/low intermediate levels of proficiency. Students will develop their linguistic and communicative competence in oral and written Spanish through the exploration of grammar, texts, and audio-visual materials. The course integrates language and cultural content in order to develop strategic and cross-cultural competence

SPA 103 is an accelerated, intensive course that covers in one term the most relevant structures and vocabulary from SPA 101 and SPA 102. The course is designed for students who have previously studied Spanish at elementary levels. Language is embedded in the discussion of cultural and social issues of contemporary concern to develop speaking, listening, writing, and reading skills.

An intermediate language course that focuses on oral and written communication and the consolidation of listening and reading skills. In this course students will enhance their linguistic skills through the analysis and discussion of various types of texts (literature, film, visual culture, music, interviews, etc.) that focus on global and cross-cultural aspects of Spain and Latin America. In particular, the course will familiarize students with the concept of neocolonialism as a way to bridge language learning with the context in which cultural values and meanings are produced. SPA 105 prepares students for SPA 108.

An intermediate/advanced language course that consolidates and expands the skills acquired in beginner's Spanish. Students will continue to develop their ability to comprehend and communicate in Spanish while using the four basic skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The course's linguistic goals are achieved in the context of examining the history, cultural production, practices, language, and current reality of the U.S. Latino community. Materials include oral, written and audiovisual texts. By the end of the course, students will be able to express more complex ideas, orally and in writing, with greater grammatical accuracy.

SPA 108 is an advanced language course that aims at strengthening and consolidating comprehension and production of oral and written Spanish while fostering cultural awareness and cross-cultural examination. Students will improve their linguistic proficiency while exploring the various mechanisms that affect how our identity is constructed, negotiated, and/or imposed. Particularly, the course will examine the ways in which gender and national identities develop and consolidate themselves by exploring cultural production (journalism, literature, cinema and the visual arts, etc.) in the Spanish speaking world and beyond.

An advanced Spanish-language course that focuses on medical and health topics in the Hispanic/Latino world. Students will learn and practice specific vocabulary and structures useful for conducting a medical interview in Spanish. Aspects of Latin American and Hispanic/Latino cultures in the health and medical fields are explored by means of examining authentic texts and through the contribution of guest speakers. The course includes a telecollaboration project with students from a Colombian medical school.

SPA 207 seeks to develop advanced language skills and raise cultural awareness by studying language in its contexts of use. An exciting selection of literary and cinematic productions from the Hispanic world provide the basis for critical discussion of cultural meanings and social relations, while offering the chance to explore difference registers and styles. SPA 207 students tackle original writing assignments that enhance their ability to express complex ideas in Spanish and hone their oral skills with debates, role-plays and projects that encourage independent learning and invite participation and collaboration

A course designed to improve speaking abilities while learning about Hispanic cultures and cinema in context. The course aims to provide the students with lexical and grammatical tools to allow them to engage in formal and informal discussion on a variety of topics informed by the films provided. Additionally, there will be several writing exercises throughout the semester that will help students improve their writing abilities. By the end of the course, students should have a better command of all linguistic skills, especially listening comprehension, fluency and accuracy in their speech.

Anthropologist Sidney Mintz famously explored connections between sugar, capitalism, and modern global history. This course borrows his approach to explore the ways that sugar - with reference to other commodities such as coffee and petroleum - have shaped societies in the Caribbean and Latin America (and, less obviously, Europe, Africa, and Asia). Through short stories, poems, archival documents, essays, novels, films, and art about sugar and its worlds, students will study histories of enslavement and marronage, environmental history, Cold War tensions, modernization, and major literary, filmic and artistic movements.

An exploration of the major features of contemporary Spain from 1939 to the present with particular attention to developing an understanding the concepts of cultural identity and difference within the changing global context. The course will address the recent processes that have left a mark on the history of Spain: the fall of Francoism, the particular and controversial transition to democracy, the financial crisis of 2008, the Indignados social movement, the nationalist trends in Basque Country and Catalonia, and the latest feminist wave, among others. Discussions and frequent writing assignments.

This course explores the vast linguistic diversity of the Americas: native languages, pidgins, creoles, mixed languages, and other languages in North, Central, and South America, including the Caribbean. We will examine historical and current issues of multilingualism to understand the relationship between language, identity, and social mobility. We will discuss how languages played a central role in colonization and nation-building processes, and how language policies contribute to linguistic loss and revitalization. This course has no prerequisites and is intended for students interested in learning more about languages in the Americas.

Flotsam. Jetsam. Hunger. Nudity. Lone survivors washed ashore. What can tales of shipwreck tell us about the cultures, societies and technologies that produce them? We read narratives and watch films of disaster and survival from the sixteenth century to the present, with an eye to how these texts can challenge or reinforce the myths that empires and nation-states tell about themselves and others.

From Argentina to Mexico, Chile to Ecuador, women writers and artists from across Latin America are enjoying growing acclaim after years of marginalization. Their path-breaking work has brought to the fore new themes and perspectives, embracing both experimental and documentary poetics. Through a series of short texts, films, theater, and visual artifacts, this course offers an introduction to Latin American women's remarkable literary and artistic contributions in the 20th and 21st centuries.

How are ideas of belonging to the body politic defined in Spain, Latin America, and in Spanish-speaking communities in the United States? Who is "Latin American," "Latinx," "Chino," "Moor," "Guatemalan," "Indian," etc.? Who constructs these terms and why? Who do they include/exclude? Why do we need these identity markers in the first place? Our course will engage these questions by surveying and analyzing literary, historical, and visual productions from the time of the foundation of the Spanish empire to the present time in the Spanish speaking world.

This course examines the paradoxical position of Spanish in the United States. The course aims to place the issues and controversies related to linguistic subordination and the maintenance of Spanish in the broader context of Latino communities and their social and historical position in the United States. In addition, it tries to equip students with critical resources to address topics such as the relationship between language and identity, political debates around Spanish and English, and bilingualism and the processes of racialization of linguistic minorities.

SPA 307 is an advanced language course offering students enhanced opportunities to develop autonomy and proficiency as Spanish readers and writers, by actively engaging with a variety of textual genres. Students learn to recognize the relationship between the form of a text and the intentions of its producer, identify literal and implicit meanings, and understand them within the culture in which they are produced. By the end of the semester, students can bring together form and function to read and write sophisticated pieces and present their ideas orally in an articulate, eloquent fashion.

Bodies of evidence, bodies of knowledge, the body politic, bodies-inviolate to mutilated, saintly to criminal-are figured in Medieval and Early Modern literature and objects in ways that reveal not only cultural paradigms, myths, and obsessions, but also some widely divergent realities. Notions of the body and its cultural inscription involve the history of marginal social groups, the history of the senses, of sexuality and gender. The relations between bodily and cognitive systems will form the basis for our analyses and discussions of such texts and authors.

The course will explore the relationship between literature and politics since the 19th century, starting from the processes of independence led by intellectuals who based their ideas on the French illustration to the U.S. Constitution of 1776. Those ideas defined the new Latin American nations. However, dictatorships dominated above the laws. This contradiction gives oppression and misery a decisive weight in literary creation and the figure of the dictator emerges as the dominant character in the 20th century novels. The seminar will be taught by internationally acclaimed writer Sergio Ramírez, former vice president of Nicaragua.

The Caribbean has been at the center of modernity and globalization since the 15th century, when European, African, and Asian migrants joined indigenous inhabitants in a violent crucible that produced new cultures, landscapes, rhythms, and political imaginations. This course begins with classic reflections on the Caribbean before centering on recent literature and art from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Recent works address issues such as debt, migration, climate change, gender, music, and the afterlives of slavery in the region.

This course explores the cultural productions surrounding narcos and cocaine in Colombia and Mexico, two countries whose imaginaries have become globally associated with drug trafficking. Beginning with the transformation of the coca leave into an illegal global commodity, passing through the emergence of the figure of the "sicario" in the 1980s, all the way to Netflix's 'Narcos' vision of the War on Drugs and cryptococaine, the course will engage critically with so-called narco-aesthetics in chronicles, movies, television series, short stories, podcasts, and art

This seminar has been designed to assist SPO concentrators in the production of their fall JP. With such end, the seminar will be conducted as a writing workshop. The emphasis of the first part of the seminar will be on introducing students to the approaches, critical concepts and tools utilized in cultural studies in the Luso-Hispanic and Latinx world. In the second part of the seminar, students will be expected to write and share their JP-in-progress, as well as comment on their peers' ongoing work. By the end of the semester, students should have completed about eighty percent of their independent work.

Studies a variety of texts (poetry, comedia, mystery play, letters) written by the most celebrated female Hispanic writer of the seventeenth century, widely considered to be the first feminist of the American hemisphere. Discussions include: rhetoric and feminism; Sor Juana's literary forbearers; freedom and repression in the convent; correspondence with other writers in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru; performances of gender and sexuality in colonial Mexico. Sessions to view and analyze first editions of Sor Juana's works of the Legaspi collection will be held at the Rare Books and Special Collections in Firestone.

In this seminar we will work with five journalists from Spain and Latin America who write about culture for newspapers and magazines. Students will develop their own texts about contemporary culture-interviews with novelists, artists, dancers, etc., as well as reviews of plays, films, and other cultural performances in the tri-state area. Student texts will be workshopped in class, with input from invited journalists. Invited journalists include Carlos Manuel Álvarez (Cuba), Yoani Sánchez (Cuba), Juan Cruz (Spain), among others.

This course studies contemporary urban poetry composed in Spanish on both sides of the Atlantic in cities such as New York, Madrid, Los Angeles, Mexico D.F., Barcelona and Buenos Aires. It focuses on lyrical practices that combine sound and language in a wide range of literary expressions. Contemporary hip-hop poetry and rap lyrics are at the center of the course.

This workshop will explore the theory and practice of translation, focusing on Spanish to English and, on a case-by-case basis, English to Spanish translation. Students will explore the main theoretical approaches to translation and the most common linguistic and cultural issues of Spanish into English translation through weekly readings, translation exercises of different text types, class discussions, workshops, and one conversation with guest speakers. This course aims to help students acquire translation skills between Spanish and English and become self-reflective about their translation decisions.

Modernism was one of the most transcendental literary movements in the Spanish language. It was a daring literary adventure that renewed poetry, narrative prose, and even journalism. It was headed by Rubén Darío, and formed a great school of followers both in Spain and in Latin America, from Juan Ramón Jiménez to Jorge Luis Borges. It will be explained considering its influences from symbolism and French Parnassianism, to the introduction of very adventurous forms of literary expression that broke the old nineteenth-century molds, a revolution that conquered a brilliant myriad of writers. A movement that had also a great political influence.

Although in open societies we tend not to view the writing and reading of fiction as an activity potentially fraught with danger, other ages and places have. In fact, since the time of Plato, literature has often been considered to be one of the most potentially dangerous media of communication. At the same time, examples and parables have, over the centuries, offered models of behavior that are overtly instructive, projecting the values of the official culture in which they were produced. This course explores these key aspects of Premodern literature.

This course seeks to explore the cultural logics of the Spanish Modernity since 1789 to the present, studying the historical configuration of Iberian Modern cultures though aesthetics, as a violent process that involves memory, power and communities. Among the topics to be addressed are places of memory, national imagination, hegemony and resistance, subalternity, political subjection, biopolitics, popular cultures, political art, underground aesthetics, historical memory, mass cultures, avant-garde and poetics in a wide range of texts and materials, from zarzuelas, theater plays and poems to novels, documentary films and images.

España s.a. (Sociedad Anónima and/or Sin Autor) reflects the problematic condition of a "nación que no acaba de existir" (Alba Rico) as a study case from the colonial crisis at the beginning of modernity to today's global neoliberalism. We explore the current research perspectives of the Spanish nation-state that the federalist movements will call "prison of peoples", others will split into "dos Españas" and that today takes fractal form: the emptied one, the one of the pools, the one in which nothing ever happens, etc. We analyze some of the most relevant recent studies around Spanish modernity (19th century to the present).

What is the matter of theory? This course is an introduction to critical theory and to some of the conceptual questions that animate theoretical discussions among scholars today, such as the role of form and structure, ideology and cultural value, difference and representation, and the social and epistemological status of culture and theory itself. In addition to examining texts by Barthes, Bosteels, Fanon, Foucault, Irigaray, Mitchell, Rama, and Richard, we perform theoretical readings of specific literary and visual artifacts by Borges, Bellatin, Darío, Martel, Rennó, Revueltas, Schweblin,Vallejo.