This course examines how politics and culture play out in that most refined of art forms: opera. The course will introduce students to the history of European opera, focusing on 19th century composers in France, Germany, and Italy. We will closely examine three operas: one French (Bizet's Carmen), one Italian (Verdi's Aida) and one German (Wagner's Die Meistersinger). Following Edward Said's work, we will examine how politics and culture play out in these works: European colonialism in Aida; the question of antisemitism in Wagner; stereotypes of Spain in Carmen. Includes excursions to the Metropolitan Opera.

How can we grasp and conceptualize the experience of being displaced from home, stranded in a refugee camp, or living undocumented in a foreign country? This interdisciplinary course explores this question by interpreting literature, cultural and political theory, international law, film, and art on forced displacement by twentieth-century and contemporary Latin American authors and artists. Its goal is to provide students with a sophisticated critical vocabulary and a sound historical perspective to grapple with the cultural, ethical, historical, and political implications of today's global migratory and refugee crises.

This course explores the relationship between gender and power through an analysis of "practices of craftsmanship" of so-called rebellious Latin American women who were seen as witches, traitors, even monsters, but also as enchanters, healers, and creators. We will examine women's skills, artistry, and agency, often dismissed as "malos saberes" (bad knowledge) in literature, performance, songs, and the visual arts. Starting with an exploration of witches in colonial times, our journey includes mythic, literary and cultural figures such as La Malinche, Frida Kahlo, Gabriela Mistral, and Doña Bárbara.

SPA 101 presents the basic structures and vocabulary of the Spanish language at elementary/low intermediate levels of proficiency. It is designed to develop students' linguistic and communicative competence in all three modes of communication: interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational. Through multimedia material, the course fosters an appreciation of the rich culture of the Spanish-speaking world. The learners actively engage in activities that promote the exchange of real-world information. The custom-made digital textbook allows for immediate feedback and autonomous learning.

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.

SPA 107 is 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 skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Materials include oral, written, and audiovisual texts that present language in authentic contexts of use and interpretation. By the end of the course, students will be able to express more complex ideas, orally and in writing, with greater grammatical accuracy and communicative fluency.

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 to raise cultural awareness by studying language in its contexts of use and at the level of the formality that will be needed in the higher-level courses. This course focuses on underrepresented communities in the Spanish speaking world, examining issues of class, race and migration. An exciting selection of literary and multimedia productions provide the basis for a critical discussion of cultural meanings and social relations, while offering the chance to explore different registers and styles.

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.

This course offers an introduction to modern Latin American literature and culture. It focuses on the complex ways in which cultural and intellectual production anticipates, participates in, and responds to political, social, and economic transformations in the 20th and 21st centuries. Through a wide spectrum of sources (essays, fiction, poetry, film, and art), students will study and discuss some of the most relevant issues in Latin American modern history, such as modernity, democracy, identity, gender, memory, and social justice.

"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it," states philosopher Hanna Arendt. This course studies the magic of storytelling in Latin America's rich archive of short stories from indigenous tales retold by Nobel prize winner Miguel Angel Asturias and the philosophical fictions of J. L. Borges and Julio Cortázar to contemporary short masterpieces by Mariana Enríquez, Samanta Schweblin, and Junot Díaz. Each class will be devoted to the close reading of one masterful short-story. Students also will practice the art of storytelling by reconstructing stories behind Latin American photography, painting, and sculpture.

This course explores the cultural, social, economic, and political history of modern Spain from the early 19th century to the present. It discusses the role of war, memory, collective identity, citizenship and utopia, as they appeared in Spanish film, literature, and the visual arts.

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 policies contribute to language loss and reclamation. Students will work with members of the Munsee Delaware Nation to develop community relationships and collaborate in a small project.

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," "Boricua," "Chino," "Moor," "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.

From its humble beginnings in the Iberian Peninsula to its multiple contemporary manifestations and global reach, Spanish is a rowdy, vibrant, multiethnic, polyphonic language, constantly changed by evolution and innovation. When did Castilian become Spanish? How did the language contribute to nation building and imperial expansion? Who decides what correct Spanish is? Does Spanish need to be protected? Can it be improved? Through the study of texts that foreground Spanish across time and place, we explore the historical forces that have shaped Spanish and current debates about the state of one of the world's most widely spoken languages.

This course discusses commonly held beliefs about the Conquest and the colonial past, as well as the persistence of these ideas in the present. Classes will survey a diversity of colonial literary, historical, and visual artifacts, around which we will anchor our discussions. We will introduce critical perspectives on the Spanish and Portuguese conquests and the ensuing colonial processes, from the Latin American and Caribbean postcolonial and decolonial fields. The course's main goal is to develop incisive questions and to productivey challenge our own modern/colonial epistemological frameworks in relation with these ideas and imaginaries.

Is culture a representation of the world or a place to be inhabited? Is literature an ideological plot of the Nation-State or a collective space of experience and experimentation? Regarding Modernity, what has art been for? This course will address these questions by delving into Spanish Modernity, from 1700 to the present. We will explore key literary works and authors' performative interventions in public spaces in relation to main cultural, political, and social currents.

In SPA 307, students improve their linguistic abilities to become expert readers and writers in Spanish. We study the stylistic and formal features of diverse types of texts, including essays, short stories, memoirs, interviews, news, ephemera, and poetry, and we use these texts as models for our own writing. We engage in multiliteracy exercises designed to draft, edit, rewrite, and critique texts, and to reflect upon norms and expectations within and across academic cultures, as evidenced through texts. By the end of the semester, students bring together form and function to read and write sophisticated pieces. Taught in Spanish.

This course focuses on one of the most renowned and influential Spanish poets of the 20th century - Federico García Lorca. We will examine Lorca's vast corpus of poems and plays to see how they combine experimental aesthetics and popular traditions. We will also study the readings and re-readings of "Lorca" as both an author and a mythical figure, standing for freedom, the defeated Spanish Republic, the historical avant-garde poetry, and gender politics. Among other topics to be discussed are flamenco culture, popular music, surrealism, the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the Spanish Civil War, historical memory and the Francoist mass graves.

This seminar has been designed to assist SPO majors 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.

This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of oral history. Students will learn the principles and applications of oral history. The class will collaborate with the Historical Society of Princeton and the Princeton Public Library to continue developing the "Voces de la Diáspora" Oral History project, a project partner of "Voices of Princeton". Discussion on readings will be combined with hands-on activities to prepare students for conducting oral history interviews in Spanish.

How do images communicate the pain of others? What made art so troubling that led people to attack it, and to try to regulate it? This course explores the connections between art and violence in Spain and its empire during the early modern period, a period of globalization, religious conflict, and cross-cultural encounter. We will interrogate how did representations of war, martyrdom, and sexual violence affect their viewers and shape their ideologies, and explore the dangerous power of images by focusing on phenomena such as censorship, iconoclasm, and racism.

Film is comprised of multiple surfaces: the screen, the actors, the structure of the darkroom, the mobile devices of the audiovisual present, the bodies that vibrate around us, the actual strip of plastic that records the images... Critics have already broadly debated how film touches us politically and emotionally. This seminar formulates a different question: how do we touch film? In Latin America, the interaction between filmic skins is founded on the relationship between art and politics. We will consider how filmmakers debate the politics of the surface and how spectatorship poses a deeply political problem for the region.

Sociocultural formations in Latin America are often explained through the metaphor of mestizaje. This seminar examines written and visual artifacts from the Conquest and the colonial period to unearth and analyze strategies and practices of Spanish and Portuguese colonial domination, occluded by narratives and imaginaries of mestizaje. We will work with critical methods of postcolonial discursive and power analysis related to gender and sexual domination and racialization, with a focus on Iberian colonial racial formations in the New World, and on decolonial perspectives on the function of race and sex/gender in Iberian colonial domination.

This course focuses on documentation and the returns of the real in Latin American fiction, art, photography, theater, and film that seek to represent, record, or enact the real, social life,and/or the natural world in an accurate, truthful way, and that claim to embody some kind of epistemological or evidentiary truth. We cover a wide range of debates about representation and realism, from nineteenth century non-fiction and the real maravilloso to more recent developments in documentary photography, theater, and film. Readings include texts by Arias, Barthes, Borges, Brecht, Bellatin, Carpentier, Foster, Jaar, Cabrera Infante, and Coutinho.

This course delves into poetry's potential as a cultural tool for reconstructing societal bonds. The impact of techno-capitalist development and its market of information has standardized and commodified discourses around different niches of thought, leading to the breakdown of common notions and increased social confrontation. In contrast, poetic language thrives on radical revision, redefinition, and negotiation of established meanings. Exploring modern and contemporary Spanish works and initiatives, we analyze how poetic writing and performance are used to address political issues through collective experimentation.

Modern architects flocked to Cuba during the 1950s: Mies, Sert, Neutra, Becket, Harrison & Abramovitz worked in Havana and built a gleaming city of modern towers, which appear as the setting of fictional works by Cabrera Infante, Reinaldo Arenas, Alejo Carpentier, and films by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Mikhail Kalatozov and others. After the 1959 Revolution, these modern spaces are re-purposed, re-fashioned and re-worked for use by a socialist government, recalling the Situationist strategy of detournement. How are these spaces read by writers and filmmakers? And how did the Revolution alter their function?