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 world. Students will learn and practice specific vocabulary and structures useful for conducting a medical interview in Spanish. Aspects of Latino culture 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.

SPA 207 seeks to develop advanced language skills and raise cultural awareness by studying language in its contexts of use. An exciting selection of literary and cinematic productions from the Hispanic world provide the basis for a critical discussion of cultural meanings and social relations, while offering the chance to explore difference registers and styles. SPA 207 students tackle original writing assignments that enhance their ability to express complex ideas in Spanish and hone their oral skills with debates, role-plays and projects that encourage independent learning and invite participation and collaboration.

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 history, including the legacy of colonialism and indigenous resistance, national fictions, popular and mass culture, and gender and racial politics. Among others, we will consider short stories by Julio Cortazar and Samanta Schweblin, poems by Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Gillén, paintings by Frida Kahlo, films by Ciro Guerra and Alfonso Cuarón, and Juan Rulfo's short masterpiece Pedro Paramo.

Children, women, the elderly, minorities, people with special conditions... Spanish culture is full of characters that represent subjects characterized as weak, helpless or subalterns. This course is an introduction to modern and contemporary Spain through the representations of these groups and the alternative social and cultural landscapes that they shape. Drawing on some basic ideas of feminism, decolonialism, queer theory, or environmentalism, we will analyze literary texts, films, comics and other genres to explore how and why vulnerability has become a central concept in the present.

Familiar and unfamiliar beings, under the guise of gods, ancestors or vampire-like creatures, dominate representations of conquest and invasion. Drawing on texts by Indigenous and Spanish authors alike, we examine the reception of these mythic beings and their place in historical narratives of the conquest of Mexico and the Andes.

This class will use Andrés Barba's novel, A Luminous Republic (2019) as a case study to examine how one writes a novel. We will examine the writing process, the editorial review and the final publishing of the book. We will analyze, step by step, the entire journey: the research process, the first drafts, the possible endings, the editing and publication of the final work, the agent's mission, the approach to criticism, the dilemmas of translation into other languages and formats. A 360 degree approach that combines aspects of writing workshop, thinking workshop, translation and literary criticism