Undergraduate Courses

An intermediate/advanced language course that consolidates and expands the skills acquired in beginner's Spanish. Students will continue to develop their ability to comprehend and communicate in Spanish while using the four basic skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The course's linguistic goals are achieved in the context of examining the history, cultural production, practices, language, and current reality of the U.S. Latino community. Materials include oral, written and audiovisual texts. By the end of the course, students will be able to express more complex ideas, orally and in writing, with greater grammatical accuracy.

An advanced Spanish-language course that focuses on medical and health topics in the Hispanic/Latino world. Students will learn and practice specific vocabulary and structures useful for conducting a medical interview in Spanish. Aspects of Latin American and Hispanic/Latino cultures in the health and medical fields are explored by means of examining authentic texts and through the contribution of guest speakers. The course includes a telecollaboration project with students from a Colombian medical school.

A course designed to improve speaking abilities while learning about Hispanic cultures and cinema in context. The course aims to provide the students with lexical and grammatical tools to allow them to engage in formal and informal discussion on a variety of topics informed by the films provided. Additionally, there will be several writing exercises throughout the semester that will help students improve their writing abilities. By the end of the course, students should have a better command of all linguistic skills, especially listening comprehension, fluency and accuracy in their speech.

How do we represent meaning to ourselves and to others in contexts of difference? What social and historical conceptions of language are operational in our scriptural practices and cultures of scholarship? Because texts are embedded in, and shaped by, communities with shared histories and social practices, by experiencing different ways of reading and writing, we can explore not only new words, but new worlds. This course offers substantial practice to help students write creatively and credibly in Spanish, using the writing process recursively to present their ideas in an articulate, sophisticated manner.

An introduction to Latin American cultures and artistic and literary traditions through a wide spectrum of materials and short texts. We will discuss relevant issues in Latin American cultural, political, and social, including the legacy of colonialism and indigenous resistance, the African diaspora, national fictions, popular & mass culture, gender & racial politics. Materials: essays by Ángel Rama, short stories by Julio Cortazar & Samanta Schweblin, poems by Afro-Cuban poet Nicola's Guille'n & period Cuban son music; paintings by Mexican muralists, films by Patricio Guzmán & Jayro Bustamante, writings by indigenous activist Ailton Krenak.

This course examines the paradoxical position of Spanish in the United States. The course aims to place the issues and controversies related to linguistic subordination and the maintenance of Spanish and in the broader context of Latino communities and their social and historical position in the United States. In addition, it tries to equip students with critical resources to address topics such as the relationship between language and identity, political debates around Spanish and English, and bilingualism and the processes of racialization of linguistic minorities.

The ways in which individuals and societies define space and place is very revealing. The investigation of space and place-how cultures turn material, racial, and/or metaphysical settings into human landscapes defining home, neighborhood, and nation-is a deeply important optic that dramatizes social, racial, political, and religious factors. At the same time, it can be used to track the changes of these realities over time. Because of its unique mix of Jews, Christians, and Moors, medieval Iberia offers near laboratory conditions for the study of space and place in their racial, ethnic, literary, religious, and political identities.

An introduction to the history of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and its repercussion in literature, art, architecture and music. In addition to discussing the major Revolutionaries, including Madero, Zapata, Villa, we will study figures who sough to create a cultural revolution in the arts: Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, Diego Rivera, Mariano Azuela, among others.

This course is an introduction to the practice of literary translation from Spanish to English, with a focus on fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. After a series of translation exercises, each student will select an author and work to be translated as the central project for the class, and will embark on the process of revising successive drafts. Close reading of the Spanish texts is required, as is a deep engagement with the translations of fellow students. Subjects of discussion will include style, context, the conventions of contemporary translation, and the re translation of classics.