Course Information

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 and Portuguese Language Teaching: Seminar and Practicum
Subject associations
SPA 500 / POR 500

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.

Instructors
Alberto Bruzos Moro
Nicola T. Cooney
Seminar in Colonial Spanish American Literature: Women in Colonial Mexico
Subject associations
SPA 550 / LAS 525

This course explores women's lives and writing in Colonial Mexico. Primary readings include examples from relaciones, historias, diarios, and cartas. Topics include insurgency; marriage; indigeneity and maternity; Black authorship; convent life; translation; swindling; monstrosity. We read primary and secondary texts by Cortés, Franco, Martínez, Robles, Sahagún, Seed, and Tortorici.

Instructors
Nicole D. Legnani
Shadows of the People: Aesthetics and Politics in Modern Spain
Subject associations
SPA 560

This course explores the intersection between aesthetics and democracy in Peninsular modernity. It focuses on the struggles for political and symbolic representation led by emerging subjects, imagined collectivities, and subaltern communities, as well as on the role played within by some writers and artists throughout the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. We examine the relationships between culture and democracy in a long-term perspective, from the 1873's First Spanish Republic to the normalization of Francisco Franco's Dictatorship, paying attention to the dialectics between subalternity and emancipation.

Instructors
Germán Labrador Méndez

Portuguese Graduate Courses

Spring 2024
Race in Brazil: Blackness & Whiteness
Subject associations
POR 560 / LAS 560

This course aims to analyze blackness and whiteness as polar and relational concepts. We take Brazil - which received approximately 40% of the African labor force kidnapped during the slave trade - era as a paradigmatic case. We examine how blackness & whiteness have shaped each other and Brazil's cultural, social, and political landscape from an interdisciplinary perspective. Works of literature, visual arts, sociology, and anthropology are part of the course program. We also use a comparative perspective, highlighting examples from Lusophone Africa, and theoretical works from the Global South and North in dialogue with Brazil.

Instructors
Rafael Cesar
Lilia K. Moritz Schwarcz
Spring 2024
Methodology of Spanish and Portuguese Language Teaching: Seminar and Practicum
Subject associations
SPA 500 / POR 500

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.

Instructors
Alberto Bruzos Moro
Nicola T. Cooney