(Pre-requisite: Spanish 240, 242, 246 or instructor’s consent)
Spanish 415 – Culture and Civilization of Spain (3 credits): This course explores a variety of aspects of Spain's history and culture, including arts, cinema, media, contemporary and past societies, women’s history, nationalities, and minority languages. Students examine a rich selection of materials, including films, documentaries, tv series, social media, newspapers, plays, performances, art works, historical documents, literature, and other sources. Class activities and assignments are oriented to help students develop critical thinking on cultural products while improving their oral and writing skills in Spanish. Different instructors teach this course and therefore its specific focus varies accordingly.
Spanish 417 – Culture and Civilization of Latin America (4 credits, AL/DG): The historical development of Spanish American culture and civilization through its different manifestations. Historical periods and topics covered depend on the instructor and/or semester. This class fulfills the SBDG General Education requirement.
Spanish 424 – Latinx Popular Culture (3 credits): This course examines the mapping of race, gender, and sexuality onto Latinx bodies in popular culture. Working chronologically from the early 20th century to the present, we will examine popular depictions of Latinx people in television, film, music, and print culture. In particular, we will analyze how moral panic has been historically displaced onto Latinx bodies—from Carmen Miranda to Alicia Machado. We will also consider Latinx bodies as agents of resistance to normative discourses, such as those of purity, cleanliness, and religiosity. Course readings and viewing will range from popular culture texts to critical readings from feminist theory, critical race theory, and queer theory.
Spanish 431 – Contemporary Theater in Spain and Catalonia (3 credits): This course examines the social, historical, and cultural transformation Spain and Catalonia have undergone by studying plays of the last 25 years. We will read plays exploring relevant topics and will watch their stage and screen adaptations.
Spanish 432 – From Book to Screen (3 credits): This class will study Spanish literary works and their cinematic adaptations. It will address the fundamental differences between written words and visual images, measure the fidelity of the recreation, and reflect upon the implications of ideology and gender for reinterpretation.
Spanish 433 – Bad Lovers (3 credits): Love is one of the most prevalent themes in medieval and early modern literature. Authors wrote about its nature, its effects on the body and the soul, the range of methods one can employ to obtain it and keep it, as well as the reasons one should consider avoiding it. At the same time, writing love also meant asking wider ethical questions and discussing what could be considered good or bad for oneself and others. This course examines the ethics of the theory and practice of love as represented in premodern Iberian literature.
Spanish 436 - Fighting Fascism: Spanish Civil War (3 credits): In this course, we will study how the Spanish Civil War has been portrayed and memorialized in literature, film, theater, and art. The course will focus on the representation of the fight against fascism in Spain and abroad by, among others, Goerge Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, and Pablo Neruda. We will pay special attention to archives of the American volunteers who formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Other materials include recent scholarship on the Spanish Civil War, Picasso's Guernica, photography, film, plays, and performances.
Spanish 440 - Journey to the Hispanic Caribbean: Literature, Art, and Culture (3 credits): This course is an introduction to the literature, art, and culture of the Hispanic Caribbean, both insular and continental. It includes analysis and discussion on the main authors and artists from the region, in order to explore intersections between literature, art, history, and geo-political situation.
Spanish 440 - Community, Storytelling, Translation (3 credits): The course examines some of the ways in which Spanish-English/Portuguese-English translations of children's literature and bilingual storytelling may be applied to facilitate inclusive public storytime programs that celebrate heritage languages and linguistic diversity. Through extensive readings, discussions, and in-class activities, students will investigate such topics as multilingualism, children's literature in translation, and storytelling. This course involves a crucial community engagement component that provides an opportunity for the students to be involved in a community-engaged project outside the classroom that is guided by appropriate input from our community partner, The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.
Spanish 456 – Spanish Translation for Community Health Services (3 credits): In this course, students will work on translating from English into Spanish documents for a regional community health services provider while also studying the challenges and responsibilities of working as civically-engaged volunteers in an urban community health services setting. Each week they will engage in two types of activities. During the first weekly sessions, students will learn about the Latino community and its interactions with the healthcare system. They will also learn about current health disparities and the importance of linguistic and cultural competency within the healthcare system to address them. During the second session, we will work on translating documents.
Spanish 460 – Imagining the City (3 credits): This course focuses on artistic representations of Iberian and Latin American cities during the 20th and 21st centuries. More specifically, this course studies how cities and their texts have responded to significant moments of transformation by examining topics such as, but not limited to, immigration, conflict, natural disasters, interior space and public sphere, and technology
Spanish 465 – Business Spanish (3 credits): Examination of macro- and micro-economic topics in the Spanish-speaking world. A project-based course (optional civic engagement component) with analysis of local and international economic and business-related issues. Utilization of Spanish terminology in commercial correspondence and business.
Spanish 470 – General View of Hispanic Linguistics (3 credits, R2): This course offers an introduction to general notions of language and involves critical thinking, logic, and linguistic notation. In this class, students will learn the formal properties of the Spanish language: phonology, prosody, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The general goal of the course is to present a broad view of the nature of human language using Spanish as an example. This class fulfills the Analytical Reasoning (R2) General Education Requirement.
Spanish 471 – Linguistic Varieties and Pluralism (4 credits): This course offers students an introduction to regional and social varieties of Spanish in Spain, Latin America, and the United States., and an overview of situations of language contact and multilingualism affecting Spanish in those areas with special attention to minority varieties.
Spanish 472 – Phonological Evolution from Latin to Spanish (3 credits): Using a hands-on approach, this course provides an introduction to the principles and methods of linguistic reconstruction to describe major derivational processes of language change from Classical Latin to Modern Spanish.
Spanish 474 – Caribbean Spanish (3 credits): Focus on the dialectal features and sociolinguistic situations related to varieties of Spanish spoken in the Caribbean. We will mainly focus on Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban Spanish, with the bulk of these readings being on Puerto Rican Spanish. Students will carry out various assignments that require them to elicit speech from native speakers of Caribbean Spanish.
Spanish 497H (cross-listed, Film 497C) - Contemporary Hispanic Film (3 credits): This course gathers together an array of recent Latin American, Spanish, Caribbean, and Latinx films with an emphasis on addressing the experiences of marginalized people. We will explore the historical and cultural contexts in which these films are made and seen, in many cases reaching vast audiences around the world, and we will push the boundaries of the category "Hispanic" in cinema. Analysis and discussions will also draw on insights from film theory, such as approaches to world cinema, "Third Cinema", national and transnational cinemas, and Hamid Naficy's concept of "accented cinema." Taught in English with films subtitled in English. Spanish majors/students are encouraged to submit written work in Spanish.