Alumni share stories of friendship, best memories, and opportunities they pursued as Spanish and Portuguese (SPO) concentrators.
For more information about Concentrating in Spanish & Portuguese, visit the Prospective Concentrators webpage.
To view information about the undergraduate language requirement, visit the Language Learning webpage for course sequence and contact information.
Dec 10, 2020 was the centenary of Clarice Lispector. For the occasion, Professor Marília Librandi has created, with the Brazil LAB, the sonic library Clarice 100 Ears, where one can listen to Clarice’s luminous writing in multiple languages and in the voice of artists, scholars, and everyday readers.
Graduate students Alejandro Martínez Rodríguez (Spanish and Portuguese) and Camila P. Reyes Alé (Architecture) compiled a collection of photographs that document the social upheaval and crisis in Chile that began in October 2019. The nation-wide mass protests which went on steadily for months—only deterred by the restrictions imposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic—were triggered by an increase in subway fare in Santiago, the capital of the country, by $30 pesos.
Catalina Méndez Vallejo, Associate Director of the Spanish Language Program, along with Ben Johnston, Senior Educational Technologist at the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, has created Voces de Princeton, a digital repository of interviews and casual conversations with members of the Spanish-speaking community at Princeton University.
Last spring, students enrolled in SPA 211: Varieties of Spanish, taught by Professor Catalina Méndez Vallejo , produced videos to capture the different social, political, and cultural aspects related to dialectal variation in Spanish.
In a special video produced for Class Day, Department of Spanish and Portuguese (SPO) concentrators from the class of 2018 reflect on their favorite memories and experiences.
Princeton's valedictorian Kyle Berlin, a Spanish and Portuguese major from Arroyo Grande, California, delivers his remarks. A member of Rockefeller College, Berlin was awarded the George B. Wood Legacy Junior Prize in 2017, the Freshman First Honor Prize in 2015 and the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence in 2014-15.
A transcript of his address is available here.
As final projects for POR 304 “Sound and Sense,” students created podcast episodes. Topics range from popular music to linguistics, identity, work, dance, singing, water, and others. Narrations and interviews were recorded in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and French. The McGraw Digital Learning Lab—in particular, Dan Claro—assisted with the technical aspect of mixing and editing the audio.
Little attention had been paid to Puerto Rico before Hurricane María, perhaps because of the complex colonial relationship with the United States. This colloquium was held on March 9, 2018, to gain a better understanding of the political, material, and cultural dimensions of the fiscal crisis and of citizenship and the construction of the Body Politic in a colony. Panels also included questions related to human rights, gender, public health, migration, community power, and solar heating. Economists, legal scholars, academics, and activists from the island will be speaking.
Over fall break, students enrolled in “Poisonous Flowers: Radical Women in Latin America” took a trip to Los Angeles to view the art show, “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1975.”
