This course offers an introduction to key terms, concepts and issues in the fields of second-language acquisition and language-teaching pedagogy as it relates to the teaching of Spanish and Portuguese. Students acquire knowledge, as well as develop and practice skills that prepare them to teach foreign languages, select content and create materials, assess student performance, and reflect upon their own teaching practice. The course's theoretical principles are applied to the teaching of the four linguistic skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. The teaching of culture and use of new technologies are also addressed.
Graduate Courses
For more detailed information including course description, sample reading list, and instructor, please visit the Registrar Office's course offerings page.
Note: 400-level undergraduate courses may be taken for graduate credit.
Spanish Graduate Courses
Methodology of Spanish Language Teaching: Seminar and Practicum
Instructors: Alberto Bruzos Moro
The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815: A Survey of Primary Sources
The "Spanish Pacific" designates the geographical space Spain colonized or aspired to rule in Asia between 1521, the year Ferdinand Magellan reached the East by sailing West, and 1815, the year when the yearly galleon that linked Mexico to the Philippines stopped operating. It includes the Philippines and the Marianas - territories ruled by the Spanish Crown - but also parts of China, Japan, and other parts of Asia that Spanish officials and missionaries imagined as extensions of their American colonies. This course introduces the Spanish Pacific through the examination of a varied selection of primary sources written mainly in Spanish.
Instructors: Christina Lee
Seminar in Modern Spanish-American Literature: The Cuban Revolution: Architecture, Art, Literature
An overview of the major works that emerged after the Cuban Revolution and of the debates about the relationship between culture and politics. The focus on the seminar is on the interrelation between architecture, film, and literature. What was the architecture of the Cuban Revolution? How was it portrayed in films and novels? How did debates about politically-engaged art and social realism enter into the field of architecture? Special focus in the Art Schools (ISA), Housing Complexes, and Architectural Pavilions erected in the 1960s.
Instructors: Rubén Gallo
Seminar in Colonial Spanish American Literature: Colonial Palimpsests: Mexico, Lima, Cuzco
The three cities that we "visit" were major population centers in their own right prior to the
arrival of the European invaders in the 16th century. We ask ourselves, both how they became colonial cities and how might we, as readers in the 21st century, see the traces of these transformations in the cultural artifacts produced by Spanish, Criollo, Indigenous, and Afro-Peruvian authors. The palimpsest as metaphor for the city would imply that many layers of writing, traces and erasures may be observed on the urban surface.
Instructors: Nicole Legnani
Slavery, Anti-Slavery, and Post-Slavery in the Iberian Atlantic
This course introduces students to important texts from the immense body of scholarship on slavery, anti-slavery movements, and post-emancipation culture in the Iberian Atlantic world, focusing primarily on the "slave societies"of 19th-century Cuba and Brazil and their connections to the greater Caribbean. Grounded in historiography, the course includes literature, court documents, visual culture, studies of post-emancipation movements, theories from the black radical tradition, and films about Latin American slavery. Sub-topics include insurrections, autobiography, religion, the role of translators, conucos/provision grounds, fashion.
Instructors: Rachel Price
Spanish Undergraduate Courses for Graduate Credit
Music and Migration in the Caribbean
This seminar relates Caribbean music to historical and contemporary migratory issues. It examines questions of listening, memory, joy, diaspora, and the Anthropocene through genres like: son, bolero, calypso, salsa, reggae, merengue, bomba, and reggaeton. Attention to gender, sexual and racial inequities in portrayals of migrant cultures as symbolic of multiculturalism, while migrants are stigmatized as risks to security. Seminar speaks to current global context of displacement with focus on climate change's impact on the Caribbean. We study music, sound, performance, literary, ethnographic and historical texts, visual arts, and journalism.
Instructors: César Colón-Montijo
Portuguese Graduate Courses
No Portuguese graduate courses are currently listed.
Portuguese Undergraduate Courses for Graduate Credit
Environmental Literature: Thinking Through Plants
Do plants think? Do forests have a language? Are our bodies separate from the environment? Are we substantially different from what we once called "nature"? Such questions have been emerging in philosophy and literature, bringing to light new forms of knowledge that are both integrative and holistic. This seminar will discuss the visual arts, literature and musical experiments produced by thinkers (Indigenous or otherwise) who can help us imagine a planet where, differently from our current world, we may still be able to survive.
Instructors: Pedro Meira Monteiro