The Department of Spanish and Portuguese offers innovative and comprehensive training in Iberian, Latin American, and Luso-Brazilian literatures and cultures; when relevant, students have also worked with Krèyol, Arabic, Nahautl, Quechua, Catalan, Gallego, Latin, and other languages. The program combines rigorous training in each of these fields with an emphasis on interdisciplinary work. We seek highly motivated, curious, passionate, and dedicated graduate students working in all time periods, within and across traditional fields, and at interstices of literary history, aesthetics, cultural studies, history, philosophy, and new media.

Our renowned faculty excel in their fields and subfields, authoring award-winning books and articles and mentoring students in all fields and subfields. Just a few examples of recent and in-progress faculty research includes topics such as the counter-culture during the Spanish transition to democracy, curiosity and modernity in Early Modern Spain, policing of African diaspora religions, Latin American cinema of cruelty, contemporary Cuban art and ecology, religion in the early modern Spanish Philippines, usury, sin and sovereignty in colonial Latin American literature, and relationships between photography and literature.

We encourage students to make the most of ample opportunities for coursework and research in other departments and fields, including Anthropology, African-American Studies, Art and Archaeology, Architecture, Near Eastern Studies, Religion, Ethnomusicology, English, and beyond, and at other institutions participating in the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium. These include the University of Pennsylvania, Fordham, The New School for Social Research, Rutgers, NYU, Columbia, CUNY, and Stonybrook University. Faculty and students are active participants in reading groups, many sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities, and in related programs, such as the Program in Latin American Studies, the Program in European Cultural Studies, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Poetry at Princeton, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Princeton Environmental Institute, the Program in Media and Modernity, the Program in Urban Studies, among others.

Graduate students at Princeton have access to an unparalleled library with over 11 million volumes, and with outstanding collections in early modern Iberian and Colonial Latin American texts and maps, twentieth-century Latin American authors’ manuscripts, rare collections of experimental poetry and early new media pamphlets from Latin America, and many more specialized collections. Many opportunities exist to support graduate research beyond the library as well, and our graduate students often conduct original archival research during the summer and during breaks. Graduate courses also may incorporate travel components to archives, cities, exhibitions, or other sites in Latin America or Spain for research.