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
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.
The cultural productions of the Spanish empire of the early modern period often appear to have a veneer of social neatness and structured compliance. Closer readings, however, reveal a messy social world in which the disenfranchised, or those who identify as such resist and respond to dominant forces and ideologies. In this course, we examine literary and documentary texts with the purpose of reading them against the grain and with a focus on uncovering their hidden scripts of dissent. Our approach emphasizes methods of close analysis and discussions revolve around issues of race, gender, and class.
Every archive is a posthumous device. To archive is to die a little bit, even when the archived author still lives. This seminar explores another function of archives, namely, that they go beyond the funereal and give rise to somatic permutations that challenge the division between living and dying, between an author's material end and the cessation of artistic production. We look beyond death to examine the creative and plastic afterlife, or what develops and survives independent of the author's living hand. To write again, the dead author relies on the prosthetic hands of others. The archive lies beyond life's closed circuit.
Spanish Undergraduate Courses for Graduate Credit
An exploration of material culture with the first modern novel of the Western world. It is about contemporary, 21st-century reading practices as well as those that prevailed at the time of the Quixote's production. We will survey intersections of material and digital objects in addition to digital surrogates. Hands-on experience of Firestone's rare books will introduce us to the dramatic effects of varying formats. Our modern, paperback versions will also reveal how media shape our understanding of the text. Images and contemporary reading practices of the "app generation" will increase our grasp of how media shape textual interpretation.
In response to the rise of neoliberalism, Latin(x) American artists and writers turned to memory as a poetic force to challenge the monumentalization of history. This course examines how feminist and queer perspectives highlight the tension between fragments and totality, residues and fixed narratives, reimagining memory as a form of resistance. It explores memory across various media, analyzing themes of gendered violence, feminicide, post-dictatorship trauma, and racial marginalization in the works of artists and writers like Cecilia Vicuña, Óscar Muñoz, and Rosana Paulino, among others.
Portuguese Graduate Courses
An introduction to Machado de Assis (1839-1908), the course aims at comprehending how the best-known and most canonical Brazilian author has been "whitened" and how a true "Black Turn" is now responsible for new readings of his works and life. Machado's peculiar, subtle way of dealing with race in pre- and post-Abolition Brazil will be analyzed, so we can understand how within certain contemporary circles he's become a "quebradeiro" (a person who belongs to the peripheries), without having ever lost his centrality in the country's "ciudad letrada" (Lettered City).
This is an introduction to Lima Barreto (1881-1922). The 100th anniversary of his death coincided with the 100 years of the "Semana de Arte Moderna," a landmark of Modernism in Brazil. Unike the Spanish American "vanguardias," Brazilian Modernism was influenced by the primitivism of the European avant-garde, which saw Black and Indigenous people as the unconscious bearers of modernity. We study how Barreto's literature, which explored popular orality and religions, was expelled from the literary cannon and how the author has re-emerged as one of the most meaningful Black voices of the Brazilian Republic.
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.