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
Woolf once said, "It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly." We address and complicate the notion that women need a room of their own in order to write and create by examining the ways in which Latin American women and queer writers, artists, and filmmakers interrupt, deconstruct, reshape, and at times shake the patriarchal house of writing and the dominant gaze of film and art by performing gender in unexpected and ingenious fashions, feminizing and expanding the sites of symbolic production.
This course explores the enduring effects of the Muslim invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 711 - its impact during the nearly 800-year occupation, and to this day. Spain's unique 'hybrid realities' of moros and moriscos in a predominantly Christian society, of mudéjares and mozárabes in their variations over space and time are a focus of our readings and discussions. Maurophobia as well as maurophilia, aljamiado resistance, religious and occult associations, inquisitorial practices and representations of gendered others are among the topics analyzed in literary, historical, and theoretical contexts.
Portuguese Graduate Courses
Drawing from critical theory, the seminar explores how past and present-day Brazilian predicaments shape cultural landscapes, with a focus on diverse peripheral artistic perspectives. As we challenge the idea of a single Brazilian history and identity and break open what literature is and does, we will engage the works of a new generation of Black, Indigenous, and women writers, who is recasting our sense of the colonial/anti-colonial, systemic racism, orality and storytelling, power and insurgency. Through multiple media, we will probe the creative force that is decolonizing the Brazilian arts and articulating alternative world-makings.