This page shows the titles and descriptions of our current undergraduate elective courses and graduate seminars. Full course offerings and details.
Spanish 111A: Don Quijote
Prof. Ignacio Navarrete
Many students, after taking this course, say that Don Quijote is the best book they have ever read. The class is designed as an introduction to the reading and interpretation of Cervantes’s most famous work. We will jump right in, with the prologues and the first chapter on the first day, and then will proceed to read the complete text of Don Quijote, through to the final chapter of the second part. Class is largely conducted in a discussion format, with the emphasis on understanding gradually giving way to interpretation and the role of contemporary literary, philosophical, political and religious ideas. Emphasis will be on close reading of the novel and on the relationship between Don Quijote and theories of identity, love and free will, as well as politics and economics. Four open-book quizzes, 2 short writing assignments, and a final exam. Class is conducted in Spanish. Graduate students who have not read Don Quixote are welcome to register for or audit the course.
Spanish 131: The Spanish American Short Story
Prof. Daylet Dominguez
Discover the great tradition of the short story in modern Latin American literature. A wide range of stories will be available to read, analyze and debate, drawing on modern and contemporary writers. Students will be encouraged to investigate the internal structure of the genre through critical and theoretical essays—many of them written by the authors themselves. Readings will include works by Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Augusto Monterroso, Silvina Ocampo, Elena Garro, Horacio Quiroga, Juan Rulfo and Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
Spanish 135: Audible Resistance: Music and Literature in Latin America
Prof. Thomas McEnaney
Cumbia, corridos, son, reggaeton. Salsa, subte, rock nacional. These and other musical forms have circulated across Latin America and the Caribbean driving cultural and political change. They have created the soundtrack that inspires popular movements through songs that carry entire histories of migration, slavery, and liberation in their rhythms and instrumentation. At the same time, writers and filmmakers have borrowed from music to reimagine the structure of storytelling and inaugurate audiotopias, noise uprisings, and sounds of belonging. From debates about tango and bolero in Manuel Puig’s Boquitas Pintadas to Rita Indiana’s Dominican sci-fi remixes, to electroacoustic versions of César Vallejo’s poems, to punk and revolution in Perú, Argentina, Cuba, and México, in this course we’ll study how music and literature have come together to transform each other, and sonic cultures throughout Latin America and the world.
Spanish 135: Present Pasts: The Spanish Empire in Fiction
Prof. Paulina Leon
What is the role of fiction in shaping our relationship to the past? How does contemporary literature address present concerns and envision alternative futures through historical narratives? In this course we will read recently published novels that imagine and reckon with the lives and stories of the early modern Spanish empire (16th-17th centuries): Luis Felipe Fabre’s Declaración de las canciones oscuras (2019), Cristina Morales’s Introducción a Teresa de Jesús (2020), Álvaro Enrigue’s Tu sueño imperios han sido (2022), and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Las niñas del naranjel (2023). These novels will be read alongside the primary sources that inspired them —including spiritual biographies, autobiographical narratives, mystical poetry, and crónicas de la conquista— as well as theoretical texts by thinkers such as Reinhart Koselleck, Ivan Jablonka, and Michel de Certeau. Together, these readings will help us examine how the novels engage with a period that has been at the center of heated debates in recent years; the empire’s artistic and literary splendor contrasts with the violence of colonization and the racial and gendered oppressions that characterized imperial rule. From a melancholic Aztec emperor (Moctezuma) and bungling Spanish conquistadors (Hernán Cortés and his troops), to mystic visionaries (Santa Teresa), and a transgender lieutenant (Catalina de Erauso), in this course we will challenge the assumed dichotomy of history and fiction as opposites, and consider instead how they jointly repurpose our notions of the early modern past, collective memory, and historical consciousness. This course will be taught in Spanish.
Spanish 135: Culturas de la plantación: esclavitud, abolición y cultura en el Caribe
Prof. Daylet Dominguez
Después de la Revolución haitiana (1791-1804), Cuba se convirtió en el primer exportador de azúcar en el mundo. El proceso conllevó la institucionalización de la plantación y definió los diversos grados de africanización del Caribe insular hispánico. Ante el avance masivo de la esclavitud, proliferaron nuevos registros (literarios y cientificos) que se proponían pensar en el impacto de la esclavitud en la vida económica, política y cultural cubana. Por ejemplo, la novela cubana nace en las tertulias de Domingo del Monte, un reformista criollo con conexiones con el abolicionismo británico.
En este curso examinaremos las relaciones entre literatura, cultura y esclavitud a través de un amplio espectro de temas, entre los que se destacan: el impacto de la Revolución haitiana en las sociedades esclavistas caribeñas; el auge y declive de la plantación como modelo económico; diferencias y similitudes entre los sistemas esclavistas anglófono, francófono e hispánico; raza e identidad en el Caribe; conspiraciones, rebeliones y proyectos nacionales; esclavitud y canon literario: romanticismo, realismo y costumbrismo. Leeremos novelas antiesclavistas como Sab (1841) de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Cecilia Valdés (1882) de Cirilo Villaverde; indagaremos en el archivo científico, médico y viajero incluyendo el mayor alegato antiesclavista escrito en la region por Alexander von Humboldt en 1826; estudiaremos la única autobiografía de un esclavo conservada en español; analizaremos litografías y fotografías de esclavos así como representaciones fílmicas y literarias modernas sobre la esclavitud y sus efectos en las sociedades caribeñas.
Spanish 165: Spanish in the U.S. and in Contact with Other Languages
Prof. Jhonni Carr
Taught in Spanish, this course serves to further familiarize students with the field of Contact Linguistics (Language Contact). The course centers on the linguistic outcomes of Spanish varieties spoken by multilingual communities with the goal of preparing students to critically examine traditional prescriptive accounts of contact varieties and U.S. Spanish in particular. Emphasis will be placed on the empirical assessment of contact influence for Spanish linguistic innovations and code-switching. Descriptive characterizations of several Spanish contact varieties will be explored alongside those available for Spanish creole languages in order to provide opportunities for comparative analysis.
Portuguese 113: Cultures of Carnival
Prof. Nathaniel Wolfson
Taught in English. Why each year does Rio de Janeiro, as well as countless other cities and towns throughout Brazil, radically transform themselves for a collective celebration? How do artists and writers capture the joy, vitality, and bodily expressions in these celebrations? How do they represent the ways in which the body and the senses come alive? How do they articulate the feeling of post-carnival, the return to normalcy, to the grinding of everyday life? How are ideas of sexuality and gender tested in these spaces of revelry? How has carnival served as a site of resilience, community, and resistance for Brazil’s Afro-descendent people? While we will focus on discussing and analyzing representations of carnival itself, the course will also address broader conversations about collective euphoria, urban life, aesthetic experience, discrimination and political conflict. Discussing carnival also means learning about various kinds of music, performance, dance, and design throughout the country, as well as the changing politics surrounding popular cultural and street life over the past centuries. This wide view––involving literary analysis, film analysis, cultural history and more––will allow us to treat carnival not only as an event but as a style and human condition.
Portuguese 128: Rivers and Other Waters
Prof. Nathaniel Wolfson
Taught in Portuguese. As the largest watershed in the world, the Amazon river supplies millions of gallons of freshwater to the Atlantic Ocean each day. This water is then swept around the world on ocean currents. In this course we’ll explore water, especially rivers, in cultural production from Brazil. Some of the materials we’ll study approach water as an infrastructural and environmental issue by reflecting on the impacts of flooding, damming and drought in certain regions. Others work more poetically by comparing liquid forms to the qualities of literary language (transparent, opaque, thick, etc.) or emotional states of being (delirious, unsettled, seething, etc). Literature from Amazônia conjures fantastical worlds beneath the aquatic surface containing riverine creatures. Authors from the Nordeste narrate the lives of retirantes or migrants escaping extreme weather cycles and devastating secas. More recently, artists and musicians from the Northeastern city Recife have cultivated an estética de lama. This course is, at its core, an introduction to modern and contemporary Brazilian literature. The topic of water will allow us to navigate literary and cultural production spanning the 20th and 21st centuries, both canonical and lesser-known, while familiarizing ourselves with some of the nation’s most fascinating aesthetic movements and debates.
Spanish 209: (Romance (Micro-)) Sociolinguistics
Prof. Justin Davidson
Taught in English, this course serves as an introduction to the theoretical foundations of sociolinguistically-conditioned variation in communities of Spanish and Romance language speakers. Much of the course centers on the empirical variationist microsociolinguistic framework originated by William Labov, which we will apply to monolingual and bilingual communities of Spanish and other Romance languages. Students will be introduced to methodological elements of micro-sociolinguistic research that correlates linguistic variables with linguistic and extralinguistic factors, permitting an introduction to several key concepts and components: the sociolinguistic variable, competition between variants, linguistic change, indicators, markers, stereotypes, data sampling techniques, statistical analysis and interpretation (emphasizing hypothesis testing), etc. Through a review of several case studies of linguistic variation spanning phonological, morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic-discourse variables, students will gain a critical understanding of the (extra)linguistic mechanisms underpinning linguistic variation in all human languages.
Spanish 280: Fronteras, borderlands, pampas y el más allá
Prof. Daniella Cádiz Bedini
Este curso nos invita a indagar distintas concepciones de fronteras, lo fronterizo y las borderlands desde el siglo XIX hasta el presente. Examinaremos las diferentes formas— tanto físicas como discursivas y conceptuales— que toman las fronteras, entre ellas los límites geopolíticos entre estados-nación en las Américas, el contorno entre la vida y la muerte, las ideas de civilización y barbarie, los espacios entre la sobrevivencia y la destrucción y el confín entre zonas temporales como el presente, el pasado y el futuro. Para abordar estos temas nos centraremos en textos críticos, literarios, teóricos y fuentes primarias: archivos, biografías, novelas, relatos breves, periódicos, arte y cine. Dada nuestra ubicación y las fuentes que nos rodean, este curso recalca textos y materiales relacionados con California y con las migraciones de personas sudamericanas, en especial durante la época conocida como la fiebre del oro.
Spanish 285: Graduate Survey of Spanish Literature
Prof. Michael Iarocci
This seminar will focus on a selection of Modern Spanish texts from the General Exam reading list. We will run the course as a graduate survey, with particular emphasis on moving from close reading and formal analysis to broader analytic frameworks (aesthetic, socio-political, theoretical, ecological, historical). We will also read a series of theoretical interventions on the question of form, from the Russian Formalists to contemporary times. The seminar should satisfy any requirement that would be covered by a course in Modern Spanish Literature.
Spanish 135: Speak American: Movement, Multilingualism, and American Studies
Prof. Daniella Cádiz Bedini
This course examines narratives from the Americas during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period when ideas of nationhood were starting to crystallize, when budding national literary traditions were being shaped, and writers and thinkers were reimagining “America” as something that exceeded the contours of what is now the United States. By analyzing an array of narratives— including poetry, novels, speeches, serialized fiction, editorials and short stories— we will trace the idea of “America” through movement, whether in the form of travel, migration, escape, expansionism, or literary and cultural translation. This course pays particular attention to works by Spanish-speaking authors, joining a vibrant conversation in the field of American Studies that foregrounds the often-overlooked contributions of multilingual populations to a hemispheric literary tradition. Our readings will challenge the idea of English as the lingua franca of "America", while also challenging the idea of Spanish as a singular, unifying factor of “Spanish America”. The course will be taught in Spanish.
Spanish 135: Latin American Gothic
Prof. Daniella Cádiz Bedini
In this course we'll examine the evolution of the gothic mode in the literature of Latin America from the nineteenth century to the present. We'll read a wide range of critical and theoretical texts alongside literary works to examine the history and forms of the genre, tracing it from its representations in European and U.S. American writings to its varied manifestations across Latin America. Focusing on short stories, novels, and films from Brazil, the Southern Cone, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, we’ll examine how contemporary writers have reimagined the gothic as a tool for cultural and political critique, often grappling with topics like gender-based violence, authoritarianism, and ecological destruction. A central question of our course is on the topic of genre itself: what are the connections between the gothic mode, horror, terror, and the fantastic? What makes the gothic so elastic and adaptable across contexts, geographies, and lived experiences? The course will be taught in Spanish.
Spanish 135: The Cuban Revolution: Literature, Culture and Politics
Prof. Daylet Domínguez
This course explores the cultural and intellectual history of the Cuban revolution throughout a wide array of artistic production, from canonical and non-canonical literary works to films, music and blogs. It is divided into two main sections, which represent two different modes of sensibilities. While the first one is marked by the ideas of utopia and new man and is oriented toward the future (1959-1971), the second one is characterized by nostalgia, melancholia and makes the past and the ruins its main object of reflection (1989-present). Within this framework, we will also examine issues such as the role of the intellectual, autonomy of art, ideology and art, anti-intellectualism, art and life, revolution, state, among others. This course includes theoretical and critical essays by Claudia Gilman, Rafael Rojas, Lillian Guerra, Ernesto Guevara; films by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Fernando Pérez; music by Silvio Rodriguez; novels by Zoé Valdés and Antonio José Ponte; blogs by Yoani Sanchez and Pedro Luis Pardo.
Spanish 179: Spanish in the Linguistic Landscape: Implications for Linguistic and Sociocultural Study
Prof. Jhonni Carr
The field of Linguistic Landscape Studies analyzes the use of written language in the public space, be it streets signs, advertisements, billboards, or even graffiti. Taught in Spanish, this course invites students to take a critical look at the production and perception of the written language around us in order to analyze different linguistic characteristics and functions with a focus on the Spanish language. The class will begin with an introduction to the burgeoning field of Linguistic Landscape Studies to better understand its origins and advancements. We will then examine how Linguistic Landscape Studies is grounded in theories and methodologies stemming from Linguistics, Sociology, Anthropology, and Political Science. We will also analyze the role that the linguistic landscape of public space plays in social justice and the effect language and power can have on individuals’ identity, sense of belonging, and social solidarity. Additionally, the course will explore the variety of methods of data collection including documentation of urban signage using photographic methods and interviews with sign creators and observers. Students will take their learning outside of the classroom in order to engage with different Bay Area neighborhoods where Spanish is used, carrying out a small-scale research project that documents the linguistic landscape.
Portuguese 104: Brazil in the World
Prof. Nathaniel Wolfson
This course explores major themes related to the history and cultural features of Brazil. Taught and conducted in Portuguese, it investigates Brazil’s distinct and plural national cultures. Among its materials are short stories, artworks, videos, songs, and poems. We will examine cultural phenomena such as theater, street celebrations, oral traditions, multimedia art, the avant-garde, as well as histories of political activism and resistance. While focusing on Brazil, this course maps global connections that have emerged in Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia because of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and their afterlives. We’ll work with materials from Brazil that recall a distant past and others that shed light on a present in constant transformation. Students with no knowledge of Brazilian history and culture are welcome to enroll.
Spanish 298: Culture and Power in Medieval Iberia: The Catalan Troubadours (mini-seminar)
Prof. Miriam Cabré Ollé
Troubadours have had a major role in Western culture, their echo still felt today. They provided the formal codes of what we still visualize as poetrya and many of the expressions to talk about love and to define gender models (for better or worse). This culture originated in Occitania (now Southern France) in the late 11th century and it encompassed an area comprising what is now Catalonia and Northern Italy. In this seminar we will explore the role of Catalan courts in the creation, circulation and transmission of troubadour culture. We will address the methodological misconceptions that have hidden its importance in troubadour culture and hence in its European heritage. We will follow the traces of power networks in troubadour literature, using examples predominantly emerging from poems created in Catalan courts. Also using mostly Catalan troubadour literature, we will identify some troubadour motifs that define the expression of love even today. Our final task will be to identify some instances of a troubadour underlaying basis in contemporary culture.
The seminar will be taught in English and virtually all materials that support our discussion are in English and will be made available to students. An English translation will be provided for literary texts in Occitan or Catalan.
Spanish 209: Empirical Approaches to Second Language Acquisition
Prof. Justin Davidson
Taught in English, this course serves as an in-depth exploration of the theoretical foundations of the empirical study of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) as a subdiscipline of Linguistics. Students will gain a focused understanding of the canonical experimental terminology, methodologies, and frameworks that comprise decades of second language acquisition research, whilst also problematizing key field notions (such as linguistic competence, attrition, incomplete acquisition, and second language learners, among others) in light of recent intersections between SLA and Sociolinguistics. Several case studies on the second language acquisition of a range of linguistic phenomena in Spanish and other languages will serve to guide weekly discussion, alongside guided exercises in experimental methodology and analysis of SLA data.
Spanish 280: The Archive of Latine Feelings
Prof. Rául Coronado
This seminar is designed as an introduction to both nineteenth-century US Latine literary history and to archival research in the history of private Latine writing. Since its emergence thirty years ago, the field of Latine literary history has uncovered a rich corpus of texts, from poetry, historical narratives, political proclamations, journalism, and, by the late nineteenth century, fiction. Yet there is little unanimity as to how to narrate this literary history. Is it Latin American, or does it belong to U.S. literary history? And what do we make of the fact that fiction only emerges in the late nineteenth century? For most of the century, Latine print culture was predominantly non-fiction, political, historical, and social in orientation. If that’s the case, then might private writing like correspondence between loved ones, notebooks, and diaries yield a clearer path to the emergence of the literary imagination? How, then, did these communities use writing to express their feelings, dreams, desires, frustrations?
Spanish 285: Digital Matters
Prof. Alex Saum Pascual
This graduate seminar explores the intersections of digital technologies, environmental impact, and human experience, blending poetic encounters and critical frameworks. Challenging the myth of digital immateriality, in this course we’ll situate digital literary works (also known as digital or electronic literature) from Latin America, Spain and their diasporas within broader discussions of ecological crisis, technological infrastructures, and cultural production.
More granularly, we’ll examine how computational technologies (algorithms, AI, blockchain, and beyond) reinforce modern dichotomies, abstracting reality while obscuring the material infrastructures and lives that sustain them. Going beyond established concepts of digital materiality, we’ll advance a broader ecological and infrastructural perspective, exposing how capitalism and coloniality persist in and shape digital media today.
By reading digital artworks not only under these literary and historical frameworks, but by homing in on the material dimensions of software and hardware as well, we’ll expand the formalist approaches most commonly seen in the study of digital literature, rooting it now firmly within the web of life in ecological and historical terms. We’ll do this by opening conversations with: book materiality, digital temporality, media archaeologies vs. historiography, media infrastructure, cybernetics, Anthropocene criticism, decoloniality, queer of color critique, posthumanism and feminist new materialisms.
Class will be conducted in English but some reading knowledge of Spanish might be required.
This course satisfies the Theory requirement for HLL tracks 1 and 2 in Spanish and Portuguese, as well as New Media DE elective requirements.
Spanish 285: Culturas del malestar en la España moderna (siglos XVI-XVII)
Prof. Paulina Leon
En este seminario nos proponemos investigar las relaciones entre producción literaria, culturas médicas y la formación de imaginarios de salud y enfermedad en la España de los siglos XVI y XVII. Entendiendo por “cultura médica” “un sistema compartido de creencias y prácticas asociadas a la salud y la enfermedad” (Slater, Pardo-Tomás, López Terrada, 2014), nuestro objetivo es examinar cómo diversos programas de salud—entendida en la época no solamente como una condición física, sino también espiritual e incluso moral—conviven y entran en pugna en el registro literario y más allá de él, y cómo las prácticas del cuidado del cuerpo y el alma se proponen no solamente la preservación del individuo que padece una enfermedad, sino también la protección de las comunidades unidas y resguardadas por esas mismas prácticas. Desde las políticas para reformar el sistema público de Felipe II, el rey enfermizo, hasta los cuidados médicos de la comunidad de judeo-conversas cordobesas exiliadas en Roma que acompañan a la Lozana Andaluza en la novela de Francisco Delicado; del herbolario y rapsoda Román Ramírez, sanador morisco perseguido y encarcelado por la Inquisición, a la enamorada disfrazada de doctor de la comedia de Tirso de Molina, nos interesa investigar no solamente la representación de las experiencias de enfermedad y salud—tanto del individuo como del cuerpo social—, sino también las relaciones que se establecieron entre el saber, el cuidar y el poder.
Portuguese 275: Relationality: Networks of Art and Politics
Prof. Nathaniel Wolfson
This course examines a number of crucial networks defining 19th, 20th, and 21st century Latin America, and especially Brazil: revolution, romanticism and affect, miscegenation, slavery and anti-slavery movements, cosmopolitanism, and global climate. How do genres, forms, and media feed and respond to such networks? We will focus on Brazil and Latin America as a region in an expanded sense—with a comparative approach that aims to think beyond national traditions. We will consider the connections between ideas of regionalism and internationalism with technologies of communication alongside the histories of slavery, emancipation, independence, and new geopolitical alignments. Given these themes, we will think together about the ways in which theories of relationality (affect theory, media theory, feminism, translation, psychoanalysis, etc) and networks from Latin America and elsewhere can be harnessed to explore transformative aesthetic and political shifts. Students will be encouraged to draw upon their own comparative and transnational interests in their papers.
Spanish 101: Spanish Pronunciation and Accents in Native and Non-Native Speakers
Prof. Justin Davidson
Taught in Spanish, Span 101 serves as an introduction to the Spanish sound system through an exploration of the complexities of native-like Spanish pronunciation and perceptions of native and non-native accent. Designed for both native and non-native speakers of Spanish as well as students without formal coursework in (Hispanic) Linguistics, this course centers on the acoustic nuances that distinguish standard Spanish pronunciation from non-standard and non-native pronunciations. Emphasis will be placed on comparisons between the Spanish and English sound systems, and the acquisition of a native-like accent will be addressed from both theoretical and practical standpoints.
Spanish 135: La Celestina: Love, Witchcraft and Violence in the Spanish Middle Ages
Prof. Ignacio Navarrete
This is a writing-intensive course focusing on a close reading of the novel La Celestina. For Calisto it was love at first sight when he wandered into Melibea's Garden. Or was it lust? At the suggestion of his servant Sempronio, he hires the witch Celestina to help him seduce Melibea. She succeeds, but by the end of the book Sempronio murders Celestina and is himself executed, Calisto is dead and Melibea commits suicide. In our seminar we will read La Celestina, the first modern Spanish novel, and in our weekly meetings discuss its careful dissection of corruption, hypocrisy, and human motivation. In addition, we will also read other literary, legal, medical, and historical texts that will help us understand this novel and contemporary ideas about topics such as sentimental love, sexuality and health, prostitution, witchcraft, salvation, corruption, and suicide.
Spanish 135: The Archive of Latine Feelings
Prof. Raul Coronado
This seminar is designed as an introduction to archival research in nineteenth-century Latine history of the US Southwest--focusing on California. How can we write a history of how the Mexican communities of the nineteenth century felt about their world? With all the tumult of war, conquest, and colonization, how did Mexican communities experience everyday life? Our class will begin with reading histories of the nineteenth century Southwest before diving into the history of Latine print culture and literature, even as we integrate archival research and explore the history of Latine feelings by looking at the correspondence between loved ones, notebooks, photographs, and other ephemera.
Spanish 135: The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939): History, Literature, Photography, & Film
Prof. Michael Iarocci
The objective of this course is to familiarize students with the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and to reflect critically on the various ways its legacies continue to come to us. We will consider history, literature, posters, pamphlets, photography and film (documentary and fiction) in order to reflect on how these distinctive forms of representation contribute to an understanding the past, particularly a past as politically charged as the Spanish Civil War. We will also take up the question of historical memory in Spain during its postwar years, its transition to democracy, and contemporary times. We will begin with fairly extensive historical material and then move on to other forms. By the end of the course, students should feel comfortable discussing the major social, political and economic dimensions of the war, its national and international consequences, and its continuing repercussions within Spanish culture today. Students will also develop critical frameworks for thinking about and discussing history, literature, graphic arts, photography and film in Spanish.
Spanish 135: Versos Libres: Poetry from Latin America and the Caribbean
Prof. Tom McEnaney
Poets across the history of Latin America and the Caribbean have interwoven poetics with liberation. Political liberation. Formal liberation. Personal liberation. This course takes inspiration from the title of one of the Cuban poet José Martí’s collections, Versos libres, in order to think through these various modes of considering the problem of what it means to write “free verse.” We will dedicate our time to reading poems in close detail and thinking carefully about their work with poetic form, history, and politics. Writers will include Plácido, Alejandra Pizarnik, César Vallejo, Nicolás Guillén, Sara Uribe, Roque Dalton, Victor Fowler, Alfonsina Storni, Octavio Paz, Gabriela Mistral, and others.
Spanish 165: Spanish in the U.S. and in Contact with Other Languages
Prof. Jhonni Carr
Taught in Spanish, this course serves to further familiarize students with the field of Contact Linguistics (Language Contact). The course centers on the linguistic outcomes of Spanish varieties spoken by multilingual communities with the goal of preparing students to critically examine traditional prescriptive accounts of contact varieties and U.S. Spanish in particular. Emphasis will be placed on the empirical assessment of contact influence for Spanish linguistic innovations and code-switching. Descriptive characterizations of several Spanish contact varieties will be explored alongside those available for Spanish creole languages in order to provide opportunities for comparative analysis.
Portuguese 113: Brazilian Culture Through and Across the Arts and Media
Prof. Nathaniel Wolfson
Taught in English, this course covers a range of topics related to Brazilian culture while shining a spotlight on visual media (film, photography, visual art) and music (samba, MPB, Funk, etc). Students will watch, listen, and read cultural materials (translated into English or with subtitles) as a way of exploring historic and emerging social movements, counter-cultural currents, and political paradigm shifts. Students will encounter major and lesser-known Brazilian cultural and literary movements, while becoming familiar with ways of reading and interpreting across different media.
Portuguese 128: Brazilian Modern and Contemporary Literature
Prof. Nathaniel Wolfson
Taught in Portuguese, this course is a survey of modern and contemporary Brazilian literature and culture. Drawing on fiction, poetry, film, and art, we will explore cultural production in Brazil throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Students will study and discuss some of the most relevant themes in Brazilian culture and become familiar with its literary movements: modernismo, regionalism, the avant-garde, tropicália, etc. Covering several important cultural movements from the 19th century through the present, we will focus on a range of authors: Clarice Lispector, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Graciliano Ramos, and others. Students will also have ample opportunities to improve their Portuguese reading, writing, and speaking skills.
Spanish 209: Quantitative Methods in (Spanish/Romance) Linguistics
Prof. Justin Davidson
Taught in English, this course serves as an intensive introduction to the theoretical foundations of experimental design and quantitative analysis (i.e., inferential statistics) as applied to linguistic data. As empirical, quantitative methods continue to become more commonplace in linguistic research, linguists are increasingly expected to have (minimally) a passive knowledge of inferential statistics and a degree of proficiency with inferential statistics software, in addition to the practical skills involved with creating and evaluating various kinds of experimental tasks. In this seminar, we opt for a practical and targeted approach to empirical methodologies and quantitative analysis, selecting a finite set of experimental tasks, statistical tests, and software packages with which to practice and gain expertise. Designed in workshop format, class sessions will combine lecture-style instruction with guided tutorials (i.e., the class proceeds together) and independent practice activities (i.e., students choose to work individually or in groups), facilitating a maximum amount of ‘hands-on’ engagement with experimental design (i.e., the creation of specific experimental tasks for data collection) and statistical tests across various software packages (most notably, R). Emphasis will be placed on the range of types of experimental tasks, statistical tests, and software packages used and in some cases developed by linguists, promoting a greater awareness of the history and trajectory of quantitative methods in empirical linguistics research.
Spanish 280: Unlearning Time. Fugitivity, Interruption, Permanence
Prof. Natalia Brizuela
The category of Time (capital T) as abstract, universal, and commodified is the invisible yet fundamental infrastructure of the modern western world and its colonial, extractive epistemes. Through and within Time, dangerously effective, productive and alienating forms of knowledge, design and control of planetary life (Denise Ferreira da Silva) have been conceived and implemented. The current critical state of life on this planet, as orchestrated by the Time machine (political, epistemic), is an invitation to learn from praxis of temporality that have persisted as forms of anti-colonial worlding through fugitivity, interruption and permanence despite and alongside the colonial habitation of the planet. Freedom from Time needs unlearning Time. Palenques, quilombos as generative sites and performances of fugitivity, feminism as a collective movement of interruption of social reproduction, and Indigenous life as the praxis of permanence will be our guides throughout the semester. This seminar will think through theoretical, artistic, filmic and literary materials from Latin America, the Caribbean and Abya Yala more broadly. We will study the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, Malcom Ferdinand, Denetem Touam Bona, Beatriz Nascimento, Astrid González, Mariléa de Almeida,Raquel Gutierrez Aguilar, Verónica Gago, Silvia Federici, Moira Millán, Elvira Espejo Ayca, Soraya Maicoño, Gustavo Caboco among others.
Spanish 280: Latin American Gothic
Prof. Daniella Cadiz-Bedini
This course examines the Gothic mode as it appears in the literature of Latin America from the nineteenth century to the present. In the first half of the course, we'll read an array of critical and theoretical texts in conjunction with primary sources to examine the history and forms of the genre, tracing it from its different representations in European writings to its varying forms across Latin America. We'll read widely to explore how the genre is reworked and reimagined by authors from Brazil, the Southern Cone, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. In the second part of the course, we’ll focus on present day authors like Fernanda Melchor, Mayra Montero, Agustina Bazterrica, Mariana Enríquez, Gustavo Faverón Patriau, and Samanta Schweblin to examine how writers from the region continually employ the genre as a form of cultural and political critique that often grapples with topics of colonization, gender violence, authoritarianism, and ecological destruction.
Students will write two brief responses to the materials as well as a short paper that can serve as the basis for the final research essay.
Spanish 285: The Liminal Anthropocene. Spain, 1965-2025
Prof. Alexandra Saum Pascual
This course delves into the limitations of popular discourses surrounding the Anthropocene, as expressed in a variety of literary works, films, music, and digital art from contemporary Spain, in dialogue with Latin America. The Anthropocene serves as a threshold concept to examine the shortcomings of modern frameworks and narratives that have centered a narrow definition of "the human" to interpret the world. In this context, we will explore questions related to historical periodization (Modernity, Capitalocene, Anthropocene, etc.) and historical memory, particularly in relation to key moments in Spanish history (Imperial colonization, Franco’s dictatorship, and democratic Spain), always seeing Spain as part of a global narrative. We will also engage with theories of human exceptionalism (posthumanism, nonhuman studies, new materialisms, technogenesis, exosomatization), queer and feminist responses to Spain’s transition to democracy, and the environmental consequences of the country’s centuries-long modernization. Given the interdisciplinary nature of these questions, the course will draw from geology, media studies, and cultural and literary studies. Our investigation will focus on the work of artists such as Pedro Almodóvar, María Arnal, Jorge Carrión, Eduardo Haro Ibars, Agustín Fernández Mallo, Joana Moll, Esther García Llovet, Belén Gopegui, Elvira Navarro, Luis Martín Santos, Sara Mesa, Lois Patiño, María Sánchez, Carla Simón, Eugenio Tisselli, Gabriela Wiener, and Iván Zulueta, among others.
Spanish 298: Mapping Macunaíma
Prof. Katrina Dodson
Mário de Andrade wrote his 1928 modernist masterpiece, Macunaíma, o herói sem nenhum caráter (Macunaíma: The Hero with No Character), in a six-day delirium, in a hammock amid pineapple and mango trees—or so goes the story. The resulting rhapsody is the culmination of a remarkable burst of poetic improvisation, but one grounded in scholarly research and transformed by intensive revision. In this four-week course, we will read this landmark of Brazilian literature (in the original or in translation) in dialogue with the vast archive that it draws on, spanning Indigenous myth, syncretic Afro-Indigenous-Catholic religious practices, Brazilian folklore, colonial history, European literary traditions, and various works of anthropology, natural history, geography, and musicology. We will also consider the book’s reception across decades, particularly in the form of adaptations, translations, and contemporary Indigenous responses to a tale that owes its origins to a German collection of northern Amazonian Indigenous stories.
The course will be conducted mainly in English, with possible interludes in Portuguese, though knowledge of Portuguese is not required. Classes will be divided between Zoom and in-person sessions. Before our first meeting, participants are expected to have read Macunaíma in the original or in my 2023 English translation (New Directions). We will then keep rereading Macunaíma as we delve into its sources, based partly on the group’s linguistic and research interests. Students will write one brief response paper (3-5 pp.) and pursue an independent exploration of one Macunaíma intertext or topic in any language, such as Portuguese, Tupi, Yoruba, Spanish, French, German, or English.
Spanish 298: Mestizaje Revisited. Racialization, Gender, and Sex in the Latin American Colonial Corpus
Prof. Laura Catelli
Social and cultural formations in Latin America have been understood and explained through a widespread, often uncontested metaphor: mestizaje. Critics have warned against the risks of relying on discourses of mestizaje, as they tend to convey conflictive and violent processes of colonial domination in terms of romantic encounters, or as a mixture of “races”, devoid of context, bodies, and subjectivities. In this course, we will heed these critical warnings and introduce possible points of critical entry through a selected corpus of canonical written and visual artifacts from the Conquest and the colonial period. Our twofold intent in working with a specific corpus will be to unearth and analyze strategies and practices that were deployed in Spanish and Portuguese colonial domination, that the cultural imaginaries of mestizaje have occluded, and to place under consideration ways in which a given colonial literary corpus conveys the (in)visibility of different cuerpos in the process of mestizaje. We will consider methods of postcolonial discursive and power analysis related to gender and sexual domination and racialization, with a focus on the specificities of Iberian colonial racial formations in the New World, and on decolonial perspectives on the function of race and sex/gender in Iberian colonial domination and governance. Readings will likely include texts by Colón, Cortés, Guaman Poma, el Inca Garcilaso, and Sigüenza, among others.
The course will consist of four, two-hour classes online. During the first 45 minutes of the class there will be an exposition of the topic, context, problem, works, hypotheses, and proposal of “points of critical entry”, that will involve assigned primary sources and critical bibliography. In the remaining 75 minutes, we will open the discussion to student interventions and seminar-type discussions. Students will be asked to: 1) submit brief (300-400 words) written reflections before class meetings in order to generate an active and participative discussion; 2) guide a 15-20 minute class discussion based on the course´s questions and proposed lines of critical inquiry; 3) write a final paper (7-8 pages, including notes and bibliography).
Spanish 131 - Small Masterpieces: Art of the Short Story in Latin America
Prof. Daylet Domínguez
Spanish 131: Small Masterpieces: Art of the Short Story in Latin America (Spanish 25 is requirement for this course)
Discover the great tradition of the short story in modern Latin American literature. A wide range of stories will be available to read, analyze and debate, drawing on modern and contemporary writers. Students will be encouraged to investigate the internal structure of the genre through critical and theoretical essays—many of them written by the authors themselves. Readings will include works by Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Augusto Monterroso, Silvina Ocampo, Elena Garro, Horacio Quiroga, Juan Rulfo and Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
Spanish 135: Borderland Ecologies
Prof. Daniella Cádiz Bedini
This course explores different conceptions of borders and borderlands as they appear in the literature of Latin America from the 1840s to the present. We'll read an array of critical and theoretical texts alongside primary sources — including novels, biographies, journals, art, music, and film — to examine the varied histories and forms that the border takes: the geopolitical borders of nation-states in the Americas, the borders between life and death, the gaps between survival and destruction, and the borders between temporal zones like the past, present, and future. Combining methods such as archival history, hemispheric approaches, and race studies, we'll attempt to answer a range of questions: How have texts from the Americas envisioned the border, and what understandings of geopolitical strife and dispossession underpin these visions? Is there such a thing as an environmentalism of the borderlands and what are some of the forms that extractivism takes at these various sites? In what ways do acts of translation work to bridge the spaces between borders, or, inversely, how do they amplify and highlight the spaces in between?
Students will write some brief responses to the materials as well as a short paper that can serve as the basis for the final research essay. The course will be taught in Spanish and reading proficiency in Spanish is required.
Spanish 135: Latine Cultural Studies
Prof. Raúl Coronado
We all know what culture is. It’s what people make or do: their customs, food, and religious practices. It can also be objects: music, art, literature and other books, or movies. But it’s not always something tangible, something concrete. It can be expressive, like dancing, singing, or myths. But some people also talk about “having” culture or “being cultured,” implying that someone is “cultivated” or has a good appreciation of the highest values of that society. But how can all of these things be categorized under “culture”? In this course, we will unpack all of these meanings of culture. In doing so, we will be in a better position to offer more nuanced interpretations of what we mean by “culture.”
We’ll begin the semester by exploring the many different labels we use to describe the Latine community. We will then shift to the meanings of the concept “culture,” and we will study the theory of representation that allows us to unpack examples of Latine culture. We will explore these questions by diving into the specifics of Latine culture. We’ll have occasion to study the history of Latine culture, folk culture, popular culture, music, art, and literary culture
Portuguese 135: The Brazilian Short Story
Prof. Nathaniel Zlotkin Wolfson
This course offers an immersive exploration of the diverse voices, themes, and styles found within Brazilian short fiction. From the prose of Machado de Assis to the evocative narratives of Clarice Lispector, students will encounter a wide range of authors who have contributed to Brazil's vibrant literary landscape. Participants will unravel the complexities of Brazilian society, history, and culture as reflected in the short story form. Each week, we'll delve into a selection of short stories (and related music and film) spanning different periods, regions, and literary movements. By the end of the course, students will not only have a comprehensive understanding of Brazilian short fiction but will also have cultivated a deeper appreciation for the diversity and complexity of Brazilian culture. Conducted in Portuguese.
Spanish C209 - Empirical Approaches to Contact-Induced Change
Prof. Justin Davidson
Taught in English, this course serves as an in-depth exploration of two antithetical phenomena in Contact Linguistics: endogenous change and contact-induced change. A focal point of the seminar will be problematizing the assessment of linguistic innovation and change as contact-induced, as frameworks of language contact span the gamut from 'perhaps no change is ever contact-induced' all the way to 'all change is contact-induced'. Through a review of several case studies on phonological, phonetic, morphosyntactic, and lexical variables in Spanish and other languages in contact, students will gain a critical understanding of various theoretical frameworks and terminology to define and consequently empirically classify language contact phenomena.
Spanish 280: Plantation Cultures of the Caribbean and its Aftermath
Prof. Daylet Domínguez
Through a wide spectrum of sources (essays, fiction, poetry and art), this graduate seminar will examine commonalities and the discontinuities among the last Spanish colonies (Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic). We will explore the ways in which writers told an origin story and attempted to foster a sense of common destiny and of belonging to a nation. Rather than strive for breadth of coverage, the course opts for depth: we will delve into the major themes that shaped modern Caribbean literature and culture in the 19thand 20th centuries: slavery, plantation and capitalism; race relations and whitening ideologies; colonialism and imperialism; nation, exile and diaspora; revolution, utopia and dictatorship. We will pay close attention to the ways in which literary, racial and national imaginaries were constructed and consolidated through the 19th century, and the long-lasting impact they had in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The readings will include works by Virgilio Piñera, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, José Luis González, Antonio S. Pedreira, Reinaldo Arenas, Alejo Carpentier, Salomé Ureña, Cirilo Villaverde, Fernando Ortiz and Salvador Brau, among others. Critical and theoretical essays by Antonio Benítez Rojo, Susan Buck-Morss, Èdouard Glissant, Peter Hulme, Sidney Mintz, among many others.
Spanish 285: From the School of Toledo to Mutatis Mutandis: The History, Theory and Practice of Translation.
Prof. Nasser Meerkhan
This course will focus on the history, theories, and practices of translation from the middle ages until today. The history part will have a special emphasis on the multilingual and multiethnic Toledo School of Translation (12th-13th c.)We will also study the history of translation theories as well as current theories and practices of translation. You will put the latter into practice through translation workshops that range from medieval to modern to contemporary texts. These will be chosen from a wide variety of sources such as chronicles, works of fiction, legal documents, articles, among others.
The first half of the semester will also include 30-minute lectures at the end of each class focusing on the medieval works from the GE reading list. This part is optional for students who are not taking/have already taken their GE exams.
The course will be offered in English; however, knowledge of Spanish is necessary for the workshops.
Portuguese 275: Media and Modernity
Prof. Nathaniel Zlotkin Wolfson
This seminar explores approaches to the pairing of media and modernity. How do writers and artists imagine the interfaces of media and daily life? Focusing on Brazil, this seminar will cover a range of materials from the 19th century through the present, allowing us to track the evolution of media and technology in different aesthetic languages. How do writers register the ways in which communication technologies alter the chemistry of social relations and political subjectivities? How do they demonstrate new perceptions of time? In addition to working with literary and art objects, we will also become familiar with Brazilian and Latin American media philosophies and their divergences from canonical media philosophy. Doing this will involve working with recent thinkers of media who have been drawing from other kinds of discourses, including geography, diasporic Black thought, music and ecocriticism.