Graduate Course Schedule (500 MA/ 600 PhD)
Spring 23
This course is about Critical Disability Studies, from a theoretical, historical, and cultural point of view. We will discuss how disability is constructed and viewed in contemporary society. We will inquire into who is considered disabled and what the consequences of being discriminated against are. We will focus on physical and intellectual diversities to understand them. In fact, in this course, we will discuss the importance of language and the differences between using the vocable disability and/or diversity. We will study the representation of the disabled body in culture, both in the US and in Iberian cultural production (ie Spain) from the nineteenth century until nowadays. Through specific case studies, we will study human and cultural differences and discuss issues of gender, race, varying abilities and disabilities, socioeconomic levels, and sexual orientation. We will put into question the construction of an “abled” society. We will also focus on medicine and science, as medical discourse and treatises have established what a disability is. We will understand that disability is a social construct. One session this semester will focus on prenatal testing and abortion.
Readings will include Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Tobin Siebers, Lennard J. Davis, The United Nations’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Susan Antebi, Benjamin Fraser, Miguel Gallardo, Cristina Morales, Ruth Hubbard, Alison Kafer, Benito Pérez Galdós, among others. We will also study visual culture (painting, comic, film). Guest speakers will be invited.
MA COURSES
SPN 513 Spanish as Second Language Acq
Prof. Lilia Ruiz-Debbe
TU 04:45-07:35PM HUMANITIES 1023
This topic examines how language development in bilingual individuals is different from that of monolinguals, how individuals learn their first language (L1), how they learn their second language (L2), and the relationship between both languages, including how L1 affects the understanding of L2 in the user's mind. Prerequisite: SPN 393 or LIN 101 or HUL 324. Offered also as SPN 465.
SPN 532 Interdic Appr Hispanic Studies: URUGUAYAN WEIRDOS
Prof. Javier Uriarte
W 04:25-07:15PM MELVILLE 4315
This course explores the slippery and theoretically complex category of "raro" (strange, weird, uncanny, exceptional), which has been central in the writings of canonical Latin American writers such as Rubén Darío. In the twentieth century, Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama used the notion to characterize a type of "anti-realist" writing that was not necessarily fantastic but that could imply a non-conventional way of seeing, describing and relating to the world. In fact, most of the canonical Uruguayan writers have been described as "raros": from Felisberto Hernández to Juan Carlos Onetti, from Delmira Agustini to Marosa di Giorgio, from Armonia Somers to Mario Levrero, from Lautréamont to contemporary writers such as Pablo Casacuberta or Teresa Puppo. These are some of the authors we will discuss as we explore the different articulations of "weirdness" in their work. Students will acquire a basic familiarity with canonical Uruguayan works and authors as we will work on the figure of the narrator, the notion of "autoficción", and the characteristics of fantastic and anti-realist literature. Offered also as SPN 405.
SPN 573 Studies in Modern Latin America: PHOTOGRAPHIC ENCOUNTERS
Prof. Joseph Pierce
TH 04:45-07:35PM EARTH&SPACE 069
Photography has played an important role in creating national subjects, defining intimate relationships, and establishing a visual grammar of modern culture. In the late-nineteenth century, the popularization of photography coincided with the institutionalization of positivist thought and method, and thus both anthropology and scientific racism across the Americas, often in concert with nascent museum archives. The museum, the photographer, and the scientist all worked in concert to create this field of modern visuality. This course traces the origins of both photography and anthropology in Latin America, paying special attention to how Indigenous and Afro-diasporic subjects were studied, framed, and photographed. These subjects were not simply passive figures in anthropological and photographic regimes but endeavored to create their own forms of visual culture, resistance, and refusal. This course will attend to the contradictory impulses of representation and knowledge that developed in this period of modernization. Offered also as SPN 435.
Fall 2022
Topics courses:
Theater in 17th century Spain became the most important and popular form of cultural entertainment. Playwrights of that period understood very well the formula to attract a great variety of public: men and women; middle class and nobility, even the monarchs, attended the performances regularly in the «corrales de comedias». The audience witnessed love relationships, tragedy, power struggles, philosophical or religious dilemmas. These plays showed empowered women, who controlled their lives, and the country’s government. Through a comprehensive analysis of plays by Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molinas. And Calderón de la Barca we will discover the way of life and thinking of 17th century Spanish society.
The Cuban Revolution and Its Discontents: Film, Music, Literature
As Jennifer Lambe and Michael Bustamante have stated, "the field of Cuban revolutionary history is at once saturated and, paradoxically, “underdeveloped.”" In this course we will study the cultural production generated during the Cuban Revolution from the years immediately preceding its triumph, roughly from the assault at the Cuartel Moncada in 1953, through present-day political and artistic manifestations. We will study the 1960s and the 1970s most intensively, as the signal years of revolutionary aesthetics and counter-aesthetics, with some attention to the 1990s Special Period in Times of Peace and recent resistance movements in the 21st-century, such as the Movimiento San Isidro of 2021.
Through film, visual culture, music, and literature, we will pay special attention to gender politics, racial politics and gay/queer sexual politics, critiquing the established political discourse (which we will study in speeches by Fidel Castro and other items of official policy) and tracing a current of oppositional discourses and also mixed discourses that struggle with the desire for inclusion in revolutionary goals, on the one hand, and the absence of civil society, on the other.
Specific issues studied include the situation of Woman in the Revolution as “a Revolution within the Revolution,” in Fidel Castro’s 1966 phrase; the rich visual culture of the Revolution, with the 1959 establishment of the Instituto Cubano de las Artes e Industrias Cinematográficas (the venerable ICAIC) and a blossoming of comic books and animation; the development of revolutionary music and the privileging of the trova over other Cuban sounds; and the relationship to international liberationist movements, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean. Authors, filmmakers and musicians studied include Dulce María Loynaz, Virgilio Piñera, Julio García Espinosa, Lydia Cabrera, Wifredo Lam, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Sara Gómez, Juan Padrón, Néstor Almendros, Lourdes Casal, Reinaldo Arenas, Jesús Díaz, Reina María Rodríguez, Nancy Morejón, Heberto Padilla, Silvio Rodríguez, Celeste Mendoza and Los Aldeanos.
SPN 542 Studies in Modern Spanish Lit. Topic: Domestic work
SPN 652 Colonial Latin-American Cultures. Topic: Colonial Textualities in the Extended Andes
This doctoral seminar studies the complex uses of writing and print culture in the extended Andean region (from Panama to Chile) from 1550 to 1750. Although our main focus will be on materials produced in European codes within the colonial context, such as chronicles, maps, epic poems, relaciones de sucesos or news pamphlets, the seminar will also study the interaction of Spanish and indigenous languages and semiotic artifacts. Our discussions will include 20th century narratives and criticism (i.e. J.M. Arguedas and William Rowe) to trace the history and transformations of some critical categories for our understanding of Andean cultures (i.e. the lettered city). All students are expected to write a final research paper on colonial or early modern primary sources based on the material and critical problems studied in class. The seminar will be taught in Spanish. For more information, please contact paul.firbas@stonybrook.edu
SPN 662 19th-Century Latin-Am Cultures. Topic: Lit and Politics in Latin American, 19th Century
This course on Literature and Politics in 19th century Latin America will be an in-depth study of influential texts from the region that have sought to rethink the status of the new republics after independence. We will analyze the ways in which these works establish symbolic forms of exclusion that have concrete effects on reality. How is the notion of citizenship understood, and which are the symbolic new boundaries of the nation? At the same time, the course will focus on the presence of voices of people writing from the margins of the new republics and that struggle to be considered as part of them. How were issues of gender, race and sexuality negotiated in these tumultuous and eventful years? Two aspects that will be particularly discussed have to do with the territorial component of the nation-state. We will explore how borders were reconfigured and how the national space was imagined, represented and, sometimes, conquered. The discursive logic of inclusion-exclusion had concrete effects on the ground, as it constituted the reasoning behind war, conquest, or actual policies that had the objective of erasing or invisiblilzing certain groups. We will also pay attention to the discussions surrounding race and the abolition of slavery, particularly in Brazil and the Caribbean. Particularly at a time when the interests in the field have moved away from the nineteenth century, we will seek to reassert the importance of the political and aesthetic discussions of the period as essential for the understanding of contemporary cultural and political debates. Authors to be studied include Simón Bolívar, Esteban Echeverría, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Mármol, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Alberto Blest Gana, Clorinda Matto de Turner, José Martí, Rubén Darío, José Hernández, Joaquim Nabuco, Eduardo Acevedo Díaz, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, José de Alencar.
SUMMER 2022
BASIC AND INTERMEDIATE LANGUAGE COURSES (PDF Brochure)
- SPN 591: Spanish Language Acquisition I
- SPN 592: Spanish Language Acquisition II
- SPN 593: Spanish Lang Acquisition III
- SPN 591: Spanish Language Acquisition I
- SPN 592: Spanish Language Acquisition II
- SPN 594: Spanish Lang. Acquisition IV
CULTURE AND LITERATURE COURSES (Poster 510 and 515)
SUMMER 2022
Topics course: SPN 510 Hispanic Cultures- Puerto Rican Poetry & Diaspora FLEX 1:00 AM 1:00 AM Online Asynchronous Carlos VicénsAn introduction to the study of 20th and 21st Puerto Rican poetry. This course will focus on the transformations of poetic language that have taken place in and through the scope of the Island and its diasporas. Through books of poetry, poetry journals, and anthologies, we will question the natures of these transformations vis-à-vis the political and social realities of Puerto Rico, its modernization but continuous colonial status, and the phantasmagorical presences of polemical and revolutionary figures within the text itself, such as Pedro Albizu Campos, Luis Muñoz Marín, Lolita Lebrón, and Juan Antonio Corretjer. We will also start questioning the complex, and sometimes paradoxical relationships between poetry and politics. This seminar may be repeated for credit when the topic changes. Conducted in Spanish.
SPN 515 Spanish Comp and Translation FLEX 1:00 AM 1:00 AM Online Asynchronous Elena DavidiakThis course is aimed at developing an understanding of the general principles of written translation, as well as providing an overview of the grammatical, lexical and stylistic similarities and differences between English and Spanish. The students will also be acquiring practical skills in translating between English and Spanish by working on a variety of written texts, including literary pieces, and discussing their projects.
Spring 2022
SPN 510 Hispanic Cultures
Paul Firbas
(cl#47696) TU/TH 4:45pm - 6:05pm
Topic: Mestizo studies
Description: This course studies, in the first part, the history of the term mestizo from its elusive and dynamic uses in the colonial period (as seen in legal documents, narrative accounts, poetry and other textual and visual materials) to its systematic implementation in Latin American national discourses in the early to mid 20th century, as seen in cultural essays, novels and paintings of the "indigenista", "negrista," and "criollista" movements. In the second part, we will explore the current vitality of the term in literary and cultural studies (in contrast to transculturation, heterogeneity, diversity, etc), in new formal political projects (i.e. constitutions), as well as in recent indigenous texts and performances. In general terms, the course is an interrogation of race and ethnicity in Latin America (focusing in Mexico and the Andean region), mainly through close and contextual reading of texts in Spanish, but also through visual culture.
SPN 532 Interdisciplinary approaches
Fernando Loffredo
(cl#48098) TU/TH 6:30pm - 7:50pm
Topic: Travelling Objects
Description: This course explores the visual culture of the global Spanish Empire through a cluster of exciting stories of traveling objects. We will analyze early modern global history through the lens of the circulation of things, ideas, and artworks as a practice that significantly shaped Hispanic culture. The course is imagined as a journey in which we will navigate and discuss the mutual cultural exchanges between Spain and its territories in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, as part of an extraordinarily extended network of political relationships and conflicts. After having introduced and discussed theories on “mobility,” “circulation,” and “the contact zone,” we will take advantage of this theoretical framework to examine several outstanding cases of objects and commodities that travelled across the early modern Spanish world.
SPN 573: Studies in Modern Latin Am Lit
Sally Sabo
(cl#55611) M/W 6:05pm - 7:25pm
Topic: Border Crossings
Description: This class, taught in Spanish, will explore the term frontera (border/boundary) as it relates to the struggle to survive within or leaving the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala). We will analyze the term frontera from a geographical, ideological, economic, and social perspective, with a focus on the experiences of citizens of the Northern Triangle as they navigate and flee the poverty, corruption, and violence plaguing their nations. Literature studied will include El sueño de retorno by Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya; ElPaís de Toó, by Guatemalan novelist Rodrigo Rey Rosa; La odisea del norte by Salvadoran novelist Mario Bencastro; excerpts from nonfictional works, including Caravana by Guatemalan reporter Alberto Pradilla; and the film Sin Nombre (Fukunaga, 2009). During this course, we will challenge our own “thinking boundaries” as we explore the themes of hope, fear, uncertainty, stability, belonging, and exclusion. The role of gangs, relevant current events, and Guatemala and El Salvador’s post-civil war societies will be discussed.
SPN 609: Literary and Cultural Theories
Joseph Pierce
(cl#55342) W 4:25pm - 7:15pm
An introduction to literary and cultural theory centered on the central questions that animate theoretical discussion among literary and cultural scholars today. Special emphasis is placed on theoretical discourses and practices originating in Latin America and Spain as well as how scholars in these regions have incorporated, modified and enhanced theories produced elsewhere.
A required course for students in the Spanish Ph.D. program.
SPN 623 Early Modern Iberian Cultures
Victor Roncero Lopez
(cl# 55614) TH 3:00pm - 5:50pm
Topic: Validos in XVII century Spain
Description: With the death of Philip II in 1598, a significant change took place in the mechanics of governance in Spain, which resulted in the emergence of a new political figure: the valido o privado. Philip III did not have the desire nor the ability to govern, so he delegated all his power in the hands of the Duke of Lerma, who became the most powerful man in the Empire. Painters, playwrights, and political writers saw in this new governing figure a very interesting character to portray in their works. At the same time favourites like the Duke of Lerma and the Count Duke of Olivares used painters like Rubens, Maino or Velázquez, and writers and playwrights like Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and Saavedra Fajardo as propagandists who presented them as extraordinary statesmen to the rest of the nobility and Spanish society. These artists and political theorists tried to establish the functions and limits to the political power of the validos. In this seminar we will analyze: paintings by Rubens, Velázquez, Maino, among others; plays by Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina and Calderón de la Barca, and theoretical works by Quevedo and Saavedra Fajardo.
SPN 685 Caribbean Cultures
Lena Burgos-Lafuente
(cl#55343) M 4:25pm - 7:15pm
Topic: El Caribe elemental : natura, pensamiento, poiesis.
As we discussed in a 2017 conference here at Stony Brook, the Caribbean has been the first and last place to confront the legacy, dislocations and myths of colonialism. Ever since Eric Williams’s pioneering work in the 1940s, which placed Caribbean slavery and labor patterns at the heart of industrial capitalism, scholars, poets, writers, performers and film-makers have sought to come to terms with this sociocultural archipelago and its didactic role in mediating the imperatives of western “modernity.” Since since European colonization began, Caribbean societies have been structured by a central paradox, deemed to be both ‘backward’—an outpost of the deranged, dragooned, deracinated and degraded – and a microcosm of futurity—where flux, fluidity and competing trajectories of confluence produced something entirely new and even laudable that was not limited to capital.
This course examines a number of works that put forth, embody or question the putative poetics of the Caribbean. We first redefine the space of the transatlantic Caribbean, taking note of islands, cosmopolitanism, and world capitalism as keys to its phenomenological existence. Both Antonio Benítez Rojo and Édouard Glissant, two distinguished thinkers of Caribbean aesthetics, proposed concepts to explicate the particularity and contemporaneity of the Caribbean region (the repeating island and the poetics of relation, respectively), which will be our starting point to discuss the elemental forces of earth and water that have long played a role in Caribbean poetics, as well as the conceptual trappings of Caribbean intellectual life and its presumed objects. Both writers question the fixity of islands that traditional national-popular conceptualizations long upheld. From there, we proceed with two parts, Political Geographies and Writings of Disaster. We will study classic Caribbeanist texts alongside other texts that initiative other dialogues around temporality and perception.
Please click on semester link for course offerings: WINTER 2022 (January 4 - 22, 2022)
Winter 2022
SPN 582: The Hispanic Tradition in The United States
Online/asynchronous lecture
Zaida Corniel
Topic: NYC in the Hispanic/Latinx Imaginary
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course aims to explore literary and visual narratives produced by Hispanic/ Latinx authors and artists portraying the city of New York. Readings will include texts from the 19th century till the present. It will be taught in Spanish. Some readings might be in English.
SUMMER 2021
See our summer course descriptions and dates here
SESSION I: Monday May 24, 2021 through Saturday July 3, 2021
SPN 506: Bilingualism
This course studies the phenomenon of bilingualism both at the individual and at the social level. It examines the nature of bilingual competence, theories of the representation/storage of bilingual knowledge, the acquisition learning of multiple languages, social attitudes towards bilingualism, the consequences of language contact, and bilingual education policies and their effects. Conducted in Spanish. 3 credits.
SPN 506 (cl#65911) Online Asynchronous Elena Davidiak
SPN 591: Spanish Language Acquisition I. Online Synchronous
Graduate 1-4 credits
Elementary Spanish I Intended for graduate students of other programs
SPN 592: Spanish Language AcquisitionII. Online Synchronous
Graduate 1-4 credits
Elementary Spanish II intended for graduate students from other programs.
SESSION II: Monday July 5, 2021 through Saturday August 14, 2021
SPN 510: Hispanic Cultures
Topic: Families in Spanish Novel and Film
An introduction to the depiction of Spanish families in novels, films, and documentaries from the 20th and 21st centuries. Through the study of contemporary novels and films produced in Spain, we will explore: the patriarchal model of the Spanish family promoted by Franco, the economic ideology that forced Spanish families to migrate to cities from rural areas and to immigrate to northern European countries during the post-civil war period, and the repression suffered by women that the dictatorship linked to the movements associated with the losing side of the civil war, which caused the disintegration of many families. May be repeated for credit when Topic changes. Conducted in Spanish. 3 credits.
SPN 510 (cl#65795) Online Asynchronous Luis Rodríguez Chaves
SPN 591: Spanish Language Acquisition I. Online Synchronous
Graduate 1-4 credits
Elementary Spanish I Intended for graduate students of other programs
SPN 592: Spanish Language Acquisition II. Online Synchronous
Graduate 1-4 credits
Elementary Spanish II intended for graduate students from other programs.
Fall2021
Director of Graduate Studies: Kathleen Vernon
kathleen.vernon@stonybrook.edu
SPN 510
Hispanic Cultures: “Multicultural Spain”
Through the study of a variety of cultural texts -literature, cinema, cultural performances, art exhibitions, media and public discourses- we will analyze the ways racial, ethnic, and religious difference is constructed in contemporary Spain. We will study representations, discourses, and practices of diversity and multiculturalism, interrogating these terms and exploring how these issues are understood in Spain today. Representations and the self-representation of ethnic, racial and religious minorities will be discussed alongside twentieth and twenty-first century historical and social processes.
SPN 510 (cl#95297) TH 4:45pm – 7:35pm Daniela Flesler
May be repeated as the topic changes.
3 credits, Letter graded (A, A-, B+, etc.
SPN 532
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Hispanic Studies:
“Indigenous Cultures: Abya Yala”
Introduction to the cultural production of Indigenous cultures including art, literature, film, sculpture, and performance. This course will draw on decolonial praxis from across the region known by the Kuna peoples as Abya Yala (Latin America), and will focus on understanding the cultures and histories of different Indigenous peoples by reading their own narratives, stories, and practices in context. Classical texts such as the Maya Quiché Popol Vuh will be studied alongside contemporary expressions of the modern lives and cultures of Indigenous peoples.
SPN 532 (cl#94127) M/W 4:25pm – 5:45pm Joseph Pierce
Fall and Spring
3 credits
Letter grade (A, A-, B+, etc)
May be repeated for credit
SPN 542: Studies in Modern Spanish Lit: “The Spanish Civil War in Lit and the Arts”
One of the defining moments of the 20th century, the Spanish Civil War represented a clash of ideologies and armies but also of cultures, as writers, photographers, filmmakers and artists rushed to respond to the events in Spain. In this course we examine the role of the arts in war and its aftermath as persuasion, testimony, and response to trauma in works by Picasso, Neruda, Orwell and Capa and others. We will also consider the lasting legacy of the war in contemporary Spanish culture.
SPN 542 (cl#95373) TU/TH 1:15pm – 2:35pm Kathleen Vernon
3 credits,
Letter graded (A, A-, B+, etc.)
May be repeated for credit
SPN 573: Studies in Modern Latin American Literature
What is a desert? How are deserts created and how do they relate to the people who live in them or traverse them? What is the significance of the desert within a given national space? In this course we will analyze different representations and conceptualizations of the desert in Latin America, working across different regions, time periods and modes of representation. We will be examining narrative texts and films that conceive the space of the desert in different -and sometimes opposing and contradictory- ways: as a construction, the desert turns out to be a way to convey imaginary, political, ideological projects. We will consider these literary constructions in close relationship to the political and historical context in which they're conceived, and mainly to the different nation-state projects that inform these texts.
SPN 573 (cl#95372) M/W 6:05pm – 7:25pm Javier Uriarte
Offered in Fall and Spring,
3 credits, Letter graded (A, A-, B+, etc.)
May be repeated for credit.
SPN 591: Spanish Language Acquisition I
Elementary Spanish I intended for graduate students of other programs.
SPN 591 (cl#95801) M/W/F 9:15am – 10:35am Aura Colon
SPN 591 (cl#95802) TU/TH 11:30am – 1:20pm Sally Scott-Sabo
1- 4 credits. Letter graded (A, A-, B+, etc)
SPN 592
Spanish Language Acquisition II
Elementary Spanish II intended for graduate students of other programs.
SPN 592 (cl#95803) TU/TH 11:30am – 1:20pm Staff
SPN 592 (cl#95804) M/W 2:40pm - 4:30pm Elena Davidiak
1 -4 credits. Letter graded (A, A-, B+, etc)
SPN 641: 19TH-Century Iberian Cultures Topic: “Race, Gender, Penal Colonies in the Philippines”
This course delves into the racial, ethical, political, and social issues involved in the Spanish Penal colonization process in the nineteenth century. We will see that labor and procreation were crucial to the project of using prisoners to build the colonial structure in the Philippines at that time. Incarceration, in this context, became a method to cleanse the peninsula of those considered a threat to industrial society – criminals, the poor, prostitutes, and vagrants—and to dispossess indigenous people of their land. We will focus on discussions on Islands studies, Iberian studies, Atlantic studies, Critical Race theory and Gender studies. Readings will include: Archival documents from the Ministerio de Ultramar, Jeremy Bentham, Joseph Slaughter, Ann Stoler, Rita Segato, Achille MBembe. Isabel Ramoz Vazquez, Cesare Lombroso, Samuel Llano, Concepcion Arenal, Franz Kafka, Antonio Gramsci, Teresa Fuentes Peris, Michael Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Grilles Deleuze, Angela Davis, Adela Cortina, Robert Chase, Juan Luis Bachero Bachero, among others.
We will understand the centrality of a transnational and transhistorical approach to understanding the contemporary treatment of prisoners. We will
specifically look at the Spanish debates on penal colonies in the Philippines to address still-unresolved questions of prison labor, race politics through imprisonment, and the importance of heteropatriarchy linked to gender violence, in the prison system. The professor is planning to invite prison scholars and activists to class.
SPN 641 (cl#95764) W 2:40pm – 5:30pm Aurelie Vialette
Fall or Spring 3 credits
Letter graded. May be repeated for credit
SPN 645: Topics in Transatlantic Studies: “Trans-Mediterranean Visual Culture and the Spanish Empire”
This graduate seminar focuses on the visual culture of and the artistic interconnections between the territories under the global hegemony of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, across the Mediterranean and beyond. Students will explore the so-called Spanish Golden Age through the lens of the circulation of ideas, artworks, and artists as a practice that significantly shaped Early Modernity. We will navigate and discuss the mutual artistic exchanges between Spain, its territories in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa, as part of an extraordinarily extended network of political and cultural relationships, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power. Several sections of the seminar will be devoted to the Portuguese Empire, with a special focus on Brazil and India. The syllabus includes topics such as: the reception of the Renaissance in Columbus’ mudéjar [Moorish] Seville; traveling Iberian artists in search of Michelangelo; El Greco’s Mediterranean; the Philippines and the global trade of ivory; the Virgin of Guadalupe and the visual responses to miraculous images in Latin America; Velázquez’s travels; the canonization of Rosa of Lima, the first saint of the New World; Slavery and Catholicism in the Caribbean and Brazil; Aleijadinho and early modern Afro-Brazilian visual culture.
SPN 645 (cl#95694) TH 3:00pm – 5:50pm Fernando Loffredo
3 credits, Letter graded (A, A-, B+, etc.)
May be repeated for credit
SPN 691
Practicum in Teaching Spanish
Theory and practice of language teaching. Applied methodology and linguistics in classroom situations. A required course for teaching assistants.
SPN 691 (cl#80829) TU 1:15pm - 4:05pm Lilia Ruiz -Debbe
Prerequisite: Permission of instructor, department chairperson, or graduate program director
Fall, 3 credits, Letter graded (A, A-, B+, etc.)
SPN 695: Dissertation Prospectus
Required of all advanced PhD students at or near the end of their course work. The course offers extensive practice in advanced academic writing skills. The aim of the course is to prepare the dissertation prospectus and a fellowship proposal. The various components of a strong proposal will be addressed: the narrative, keywords, the methodological or theoretical frame, the research plan, the bibliography, and the personal statement.
SPN 695 (cl#95695) M 1:00pm – 3:50pm Aurelie Vialette
Fall, 3 credits, Letter graded (A, A-, B+, etc.)
POR 511: Portuguese for Spanish Speakers
A one semester accelerated course in Brazilian Portuguese for students with a native or near – native command of Spanish. This course uses Spanish as a base for study of Portuguese grammar vocabulary and pronunciation. By the end of the semester students will be prepared to read advance materials and will acquire a basic proficiency in speaking, writing and comprehension of standard Brazilian Portuguese.
A grade of B- or above will satisfy the graduate language proficiency requirement in Portuguese for the MA or PhD. Department consent is required for enrollment
POR 511 (cl#95807) TU 1:15pm – 4:05pm Tábata Yonaha
3 credits
SPRING 2021
SPN 510 Hispanic Culture. Topic: “Touristic Narratives”
TU 6:30pm-9:20-pm. Online through zoom. (cl#48399)
Prof. Zaida Corniel
This course will analyze touristic narratives on Latin America, the Caribbean and
its diaspora through contemporary art, films, literature and media. We will explore
topics such as borderland, urban/rural spaces, ethnicity, sex tourism, ecotourism,
among others, and how touristic discourses have responded to current challenges due
to a pandemic. The seminar will be taught in Spanish.
3 credits. Letter grade. May be repeated for credit
SPN 513 Spanish as Second Language Acquisition
M 6:05pm-8:55pm. Online through zoom. (cl#55019)
Prof. Lilia Ruiz-Debbe
This course examines how language development in bilingual individuals is different
from that of monolinguals, how individuals learn their first language (L1), how they
learn their second language (L2), and the relationship between both languages, including
how L1 affects the understanding of L2 in the user's mind.
3 credits. Letter Graded (A, A-, B+, etc)
SPN 523 Golden Age Literature
Topic: “Picaros, Buffoons in Spanish Literature & Art"
TU/TH 4:45pm – 6:05pm. In-Person. (cl#47905)
Prof. Victor Roncero-Lopez
16th and 17th centuries painters, novelists, and poets portrayed rogues, buffoons,
poor people, and prostitutes as main characters in their works. During the semester
we will analyze the representation of these social outcasts in the literature and
art of these centuries, examining these characters in the larger context of European
society.
3 credits. Letter graded (A, A-, B, B+, etc)
SPN 588 Directed Master’s Research
by appointment. (cl#43191)
See Graduate Director
For work toward the M.A. thesis, or preparation for the M.A. comprehensive examination
only. This course is mainly intended for students who are not continuing toward the
Ph.D.
Fall and Spring, 1-6 credits, ABCF grading. May be repeated for credit
Prerequisite: permission of graduate program director, M.A. thesis director and/or
director of the M.A. comprehensive examination committee.
SPN 591 Spanish Language Acquisition l
SPN 591.01 (cl#55443). TU/TH 8:00am – 9:20am. Online zoom. Carolina Boutureira
SPN 591.01 (cl#55441). RecTU 9:45am-10:40am. Online zoom. Carolina Boutureira
SPN 591.02 (cl#55444). M/W/F 11:31am –12:25pm Online zoom. Aura Colon
SPN 591.02 (cl#55442). RecM 10:31am-11:25am Online zoom. Aura Colon
Elementary Spanish I intended for graduate students from other programs.
Letter Graded (A, A-, B, B+, etc). 1-4 credits
SPN 592.01 Spanish Language Acquisition II
SPN 592.01 (cl#55446) M/W 2:40pm – 4:00pm. Online zoom. ElenaDavidiak
SPN 592.01 (cl#55445) REC M 1:00pm-1:55 pm. Online zoom. ElenaDavidiak
SPN 592.02 (cl#55448) LEC TU/TH 1:15pm – 2:35pm. Online zoom. Micheal McMahon
SPN 592.02 (cl#55447) REC Tu 3:00pm-3:55 pm. Online zoom. Micheal McMahon
Elementary Spanish II intended for graduate students from other programs.
1-4 credits. Letter Graded (A, A-, B, B+, etc)
SPN 595 Directed Independent Studies
(cl#43196). By appointment. Staff
For M.A. and Ph.D. candidates only. Requires a written proposal signed by the faculty member involved and the approval of the graduate program director and the departmental chairperson. No more than a total of nine credits may be applied toward a Spanish graduate degree or combination of degrees
3 credits. Fall or Spring, Letter grade. May be repeated for credit
SPN 612 Topics Seminar: “Decoloniality and Queer Studies”
M 2:40pm - 5:30pm. Online zoom. (cl#47347)
Prof. Joseph Pierce
White supremacy sux. Let’s do queer decolonial? Or maybe: how does queerness interface with recent critiques of coloniality, the decolonial turn (if such a thing exists), and ongoing Indigenous and Black resistance? Or maybe, what this course means to say is: what does queerness have to do with decoloniality? Let us recall: in recent years, the epistemological foundations of queer studies, as a field and mode of engagement with bodies and their diverse orientations, have been critiqued by scholars and activists from the Global South—where the Global South is not so much a place, but a mode of critique attuned to Black and Brown solidarities. To Queer, Cuir, Cuyr, Kuir, Kuyr. These critiques have consolidated around the possibility—indeed the desirability—of translating queerness to other contexts, the commensurability of embodied knowledge and desires across difference, and the imperial reach of western modernity in its complicity with academic fields and disciplines. This course is about these embodied conflicts: of knowledge production, the desire and desirability of translating queerness, and the possibilities of decolonial refashionings grounded in Indigenous and Afrodiasporic knowledges, embodiments, and histories. (Course taught in English. Readings in Spanish, Portuguese, and English).
3 credits. Letter graded (A, A-, B, B+, etc)
SPN 662 19th Century Latin American Literature and Culture. Topic: “Sertão/pampa: spatial imagination and cultural production in Argentina and Brazil”
TH 3:00pm – 5:50pm. Online through zoom. (cl#55020)
Prof. Javier Uriarte
This comparative course discusses the importance of spatial imagination in the national narratives of Argentina and Brazil, seeking to explore the ways in which the notions of nature, landscape, and space have been pivotal in intellectual projects of nation building and identity. How does the city imagine those parts of the country that are different from it? What kinds of relationships (anxiety, conquest, mutual fear and mistrust) are established between the city and its backlands? Which is the status of those lands within the symbolic boundaries of the nation? How are “interiority” and “exteriority” (in other words, belonging) negotiated in these representations? The course also strives to discuss the ways in which geography is transformed and acquires changing meanings and connotations through history and in dialogue with political and social phenomena. We will analyze spaces in relation to movement, circulation (of peoples and goods), and relation to global markets. The blurry notions of border, frontier, and desert will be discussed, as they are key in the articulation of the manifold meanings the pampa and the sertão acquire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The connections of those notions with violence, modernization, migration, capital, geography, and the state will be at the center of this course.
Representations of the Argentine pampas by Esteban Echeverría, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Eduarda Mansilla, José Hernández, Estanislao Zeballos, William Henry Hudson, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan José Saer, and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara will be discussed. Perspectives on the Brazilian sertões will include those of José de Alencar, Alfredo d’Escragnolle Taunay, Euclides da Cunha, Graciliano Ramos, Rachel de Queiroz, João Cabral de Melo Neto, and João Guimarães Rosa. We will also study cinematic representations of the sertão from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The course will be structured comparatively, so that the different and parallel political, economic and social processes of these two South American countries can be studied in dialogue. Also, the course will be open to comparable cases in other countries throughout the Americas. In addition, the specific configurations that aesthetic movements such as Romanticism, Naturalism, and Regionalism adopt in Argentina and Brazil will be central to our approach. Critical and theoretical works by Ángel Rama, Deleuze and Guattari, Henri Lefebvre, Fermín Rodríguez, Beatriz Sarlo, Cristina Iglesia, James C. Scott, Nísia Trindade Lima, Michel de Certeau, João Ehlert Maia, Edward Said, Roberto Schwarz, Francisco Foot Hardman, Walnice Nogueira Galvão, among others, will be discussed together with the selected texts.
The course will be taught in Spanish but English and Portuguese speakers are welcome. Reading knowledge of Portuguese is welcome but not required (all Brazilian texts will be available in Spanish and/or English).
3 credits. Letter graded (A, A-, B, B+, etc)
SPN 675 Topics in Hispanic Cinema: “Documentary Cinema in Latin America and Spain”
W 4:25pm-7:15pm Hybrid (Through zoom except for 2 meetings in late April which
will be in person. Students who cannot attend in person can do so through zoom) (cl#55428)
Prof. Kathleen Vernon
A selective history of documentary cinema as a narrative form and its multiple interventions in the social and political life of the nation(s)/region(s). We will analyze the role of ethnographic and militant cinema, the links between documentary and the new cinema movements of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, the more recent emergence of first-person, “creative” and auteurist documentary, and the always tenuous boundaries between fiction and non-fiction film. While concentrating on the work of Spanish and Latin American filmmakers, including Fernando Solanas, Sara Gómez, Basilio Martín Patino and José Luis Guerín, we will also consider the efforts to document (or mythologize) Spanish and Latin American realities by foreign directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, Joris Ivens and Orson Welles.
3 credits. Letter graded (A, A-, B, B+, etc)
SPN 681 Directed Readings
By appointment. Staff. (cl#43200)
For students who have completed all doctoral requirements and wish to dedicate themselves
to full or part-time preparation for the comprehensive examination.
Prerequisite: Coursework toward the Ph.D. must be completed; permission of the dissertation director, Graduate Program Director, or Department Chairperson.
Fall and Spring, 1-9 credits, S/U grading. May be repeated for credit
SPN 693 Practicum in Teaching Spanish
M/W 8:30pm – 9:50pm. (cl#45575)
Prof. Lilia Ruiz Debbe
This course is to be taken in conjunction with the student’s teaching assignments. Each week’s discussion enters on problems of applied linguistics or grammar. Discussion will also be focused on methodology (audio-lingual method, pattern drills, language laboratory, and preparation of examinations).
3 credits s/u grading
WINTER 2021
SPN 582: The Hispanic Tradition in the United States
Topic: Amor, cohetes y perdidas: Visualizing Latinx Identity in Graphic Narratives
This course examines the artistic and cultural production of Latinx creators and the way mainstream popular culture has traditionally created, adapted, or deployed already existing ethnicity markers to represent Latinx populations. We will begin with an introduction to comic studies providing definitions for terms such as: comics, comic book, graphic novel, graphic narrative and sequential art. Then, we will explore the tools provided by the medium to represent ethnicity and race and how these have been used in comics, with a special emphasis on color techniques. We will explore the coloring techniques used for Latinx characters in mainstream American comics as an expression of colorism, the visual creation of “others.” Through close readings of a selection of graphic novels and comic books, the class reading materials and discussions will focus on the sociopolitical context in which the term Latinx emerged. We will also examine the relationship between these Latinx representations and the normative narrative of what it means to be American. The Latinx experience usually manifests a feeling of existing in-between identitary spaces as symbolized by the liminality contained in their being represented as a hyphenated identity. To do so, we will pay special attention to the work of Jessica Abel and the Hernandez Brothers.
3 credits, Letter graded (A, A-, B+, etc.) May be repeated for credit
Class #1467
Online Asynchronous - Moisés Hassan
FALL 2020
SPN 532: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Hispanic Studies:- Topic: Hispanic Visual Cultures (online)
Vision makes meaning out of the world. It can render intelligible the material realities that surround us, as it can impinge on those realities producing something more, something in excess of our capacity to comprehend, to believe, what we are seeing. This course is about those contradictions. We will interrogate visual cultures in the context of Latin America by asking how visuality stages and enacts the uneven power dynamics, and racial, gendered, and sexual economies that emerged over five centuries of colonial rule in the Americas. In doing so, this course will ask how Latin America is constituted through conflicting visual cultures; how the colonial gaze has endeavored to render Black and Indigenous subjects as objects of fascination and degeneracy; and how those same marginalized subjects have responded, resisted, and reshaped Latin American visuality through decolonial imaginaries that are rooted in history and which project new, future-oriented worlds.
SPN 532 (cl#94473) M 6:05 pm - 8:55 pm Joseph Pierce
Note: offered as SPN 405 and SPN 532
SPN 551: Early Latin American Literature – Topic: Latin American History Through Fiction (online)
This course will study fictional Latin American narratives from the 19th to 21st centuries as complex sources of historical knowledge. We will be focusing on the testimonial and experiential contents and comparing them to classic readings on Latin American history, from the ending of the colonial period to the migrating communities of the postmodern times. The course will include some theoretical texts on the rhetoric of historiography and the tensions between history and fiction.
Note: Offered as SPN 415 and SPN 551
SPN 551 (cl#94476) W 6:05 pm - 8:55 pm Paul Firbas
SPN 585: Caribbean Literature- Topic: Revolutionary Islands (online)
Taking two modern events of signal importance as axiomatic—the Haitian Revolution (1791) and the Cuban Revolution (1959)—and keeping in mind the more recent Grenada Revolution (1979-83), the course examines revolutionary experiments in aesthetics. That is, the course will take revolution as its critical articulation: from historical events of revolution, to aesthetics of revolution, to what has transpired with revolution since the ascendancy and dominance of the global International Monetary Fund and World Bank, global policies regarding population control, border patrolling, and refugee status, and tourism and its attendant industries.
While focusing on the cultural production of the Hispanic insular Caribbean,
we will also study dialogical exchanges with the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean
and the Continental Caribbean, illuminating the key continuities and divergences of
this corpus and addressing race, gender, coloniality, and aesthetics. We will examine
documentaries, political writings, poetry, fiction, historical narratives and music.
Note: Offered as SPN 585 and SPN 435
SPN 585 (cl#94472) TUTH 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm L. Burgos Lafuente
SPN 591: Spanish Acquisition I (in person)
Elementary Spanish I Intended for graduate students of other programs
An introduction to spoken and written Spanish, stressing pronunciation, speaking, comprehension, reading, and writing. Language laboratory supplements class work. Intended for students without any prior knowledge of the language. All entering students should take a placement exam to evaluate their proficiency. Please see https://llrc.stonybrook.edu/placement-exams for more information.
SPN 591 (Cl#95900) MW 2:40 pm - 4:00 pm Sally Scott-Sabo
SPN 591 (Cl#95899) Rec W 4:25 pm - 5:20 pm Sally Scott-Sabo
4 credits
SPN592: Spanish Acquisition II (online)
Elementary Spanish II intended for graduate students from other programs. An introduction to spoken and written Spanish, stressing pronunciation, speaking, comprehension, reading, and writing. Language laboratory supplements class work. All entering students should take a placement exam to evaluate their proficiency. Please see https://llrc.stonybrook.edu/placement-exams for more information.
4 credits
SPN 592 (Cl#95922) MW 4:25 pm- 5:45 pm Natalia Chamorro
SPN 592 (Cl#95921) Rec MW 5:46- 6:15 pm Natalia Chamorro
SPN 612: Topics Seminar -Topic: Spain and its Others (online)
This course studies the historical imaginary about Muslims and Jews in Spain alongside the racialization and extermination of Republicans (those identified as leftists and their supporters) during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-75). The course is anchored in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries around the topics immigration and the construction of cultural identity in contemporary Spain, but it will also explore prior historical processes and the historiography and memory built around them as essential factors to understand contemporary perceptions of Muslim and Jewish minorities in Spain today. These historical processes include the 711 Arab “conquest” of the Iberian Peninsula, the formation and idealization of al-Andalus, the conversions of Muslims and Jews to Christianity and the consequent formation of genealogical and racial thought in Spain, the transformations and uses of medieval Arab and Jewish buildings and spaces, and Spain’s colonial relationship with Morocco and North African Muslims and Jews. Throughout the class, we will watch fiction films and documentaries, virtually visit specific sites in Spain, and read novels, testimonies and short stories that encapsulate and work through these issues while presenting a wide variety of modes of writing and formal experimentation.
SPN 612 (Cl#80158) W 4:25 - 7:15 pm Daniela Flesler
SPN 652: Colonial Latin American Cultures-Topic: Information and Narration in Andean Colonial Textualities (hybrid)
This seminar studies the textural culture of colonial Latin America, dealing with a diversity of genres, from legal writing, historiography, autobiography and epic poetry to visual materials, such as drawings, textiles, decorated vases, etc. The course explores the transatlantic Ibero-American traditions in relation to native and local cultures. Major authors and historical events will be studied in depth along with current criticism and theories.
“Information and Narration in Andean Colonial Textualities” is a doctoral seminar dedicated to study writing technologies, narrative and information structures in various discourses and textualities within the Spanish colonial and mestizo society in the extend Andes between the 16th and early 18th centuries.
SPN 652 (Cl#94474) M 2:40 pm - 5:30 pm Paul Firbas
SPN 691: Practicum in the Teaching of Spanish Language (online)
Theory and practice of language teaching. Applied methodology and linguistics in classroom situations. A required course for teaching assistants.
Prerequisite: Permission of instructor, department chairperson, or graduate program director. Fall, 3 credits, Letter graded (A, A-, B+, etc.)
SPN 691 (CL#80162) TU 1:15 pm – 4:05 pm Lilia Ruiz Debbe
SUMMER 2020
SUMMER 2020 TERM I: May 26-July 20 all courses online
SPN 503 Spanish Linguistics MEDICAL SPANISH
This Medical Spanish course is intended for students studying or planning a career
in health-related fields. It combines practice in speaking, reading, listening and
writing in Spanish with vocabulary relevant to the healthcare field. 3 credits
Online. Instructor: Elena Davidiak
SPN 532 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Hispanic Studies
Topic: Hispanic Fiction and Resistance
This course will offer an in-depth analysis of Hispanic works of literature and film
from 19th century until now, with a view to explore how these works function as vehicles
of resistance to distinct forms of oppression such as economic injustice, racism,
gender-based discrimination and ideological persecution.
Letter graded (A, A-, etc.) May be repeated for credit. 3 credits. Online. Instructor:
Régulo Silva
SUMMER 2020 TERM II: Jul 6-Aug 15 all courses online
SPN 542 Studies in Modern Spanish Literature
Major literary works of the 19th and 20th centuries will be read and analyzed in depth
in relation to their broader cultural and historical content. Letter graded (A, A-,
etc.) May be repeated for credit.3 credits
Online. Instructor: Isabel Murcia Estrada
SPRING 2020
SPN 505 Hispanic Dialectology and Sociolinguistics
Prof. Elena Davidiak
W 06:00-09:00PM in Humanities 1051
Major theoretical issues involved in analysis of geographical and social variation
and with the principal methods used in its investigation, as applied to varieties
of Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and Galician.
Fall or spring, 3 credits, ABCF grading
May be repeated for credit
SPN 510 Children’s and Young Adult Literature in Spanish
Prof. Kathleen Vernon
TH 05:30-08:30PM in Humanities 1051
An introduction to the study of children’s and young adult literature originally written in Spanish. We will work with texts that represent a broad range of genres and age spans, from picture books and early readers to more complex YA literature that addresses challenging topics. Works will be drawn from across Latin America, Spain and the Latino US.
SPN 523 Women Power in Early Modern Spain
Prof. Víctor Roncero-López
T & Th 11:30-12:50 in Melville Library N4000
En la sociedad europea del siglo XVII la mujer jugaba un papel secundario, la mayoría de las ocasiones supeditada a la autoridad masculina. Sin embargo en la comedia española de esta época no siempre aparece la mujer como personaje secundario, sino que en muchas de ellas se convierte en el motor de la acción, en la persona que mueve los hilos, sometiendo al hombre a su poder. En el curso vamos a analizar varias obras de Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderón y novelas de María de Zayas, en cuyas obras la mujer juega un papel fundamental, tanto en el ámbito doméstico como en el público, en dramas como en comedias y en novelas.
In 17th Century European society, women often played secondary roles, mainly under male authority. But Spanish comedy of this era puts women in a more central position to the action, and even drove the plot and pulled the strings to puppet men to do their will. In this course, we will analyze numerous plays by Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderón, as well as novels by María de Zayas as a means of exploring how women in these works played a pivotal role in both the domestic and public spheres in various media.
SPN 609 Literary Theory
Prof. Adrian Perez Melgosa
M 04:30-07:30PM in Humanities 2036
This course is an in-depth introduction to literary and cultural theory organized around some of the central questions that animate discussions among literary and cultural scholars today. We will review a variety of theoretical perspectives produced in different times and locations, and place special emphasis on theoretical discourses and practices originating in Latin America and Spain as well as how scholars in these regions have incorporated, modified and enhanced some theories produced abroad. Questions explored in the course will include: the role of culture in shaping structures of power, the study of the links between literature, ideology, and the mechanisms of hegemony, theories of the unconscious in artistic, political and cultural production, the study of the colonial and post-colonial conditions, the social workings of categories such as race, class and gender, the role of culture and literary production in market centered societies, the political implications of aesthetics, the use of cultural memory, and the status of theory in the literary and cultural professions.
SPN 628 Politics in 17th century Literature
Prof. Víctor Roncero-López
Th. 2:30-5:30 in Humanities 2036
Los objetivos del semestre son varios: en primer lugar, el conocimiento de la realidad histórica y política de la España de los Austrias mayores y menores (Carlos V, Felipe II, Felipe III y Felipe IV) en la primera mitad del siglo XVII a través de unos textos literarios y pictóricos; en segundo lugar, el análisis minucioso de las figuras de poder (reyes, reinas, príncipes, primeros ministros) tal y como fueron retratados por los grandes pintores (Tiziano, Velázquez, Rubens, Maíno) y por los grandes dramaturgos (Lope, Tirso, Calderón, Rojas Zorrilla) de los siglos XVI y XVII. Especial atención se dedicará al papel del rey o de la reina, en relación con la teoría política humanista.
This course will be dedicated to studying the role of royalty in the 17th Century through the analysis of several critical Spanish works. Students will learn about the historical and political contexts of the reign of the Hapsburgs (Carlos V, Felipe II, Felipe III y Felipe IV) in the first half of the 17th Century. From there, we will conduct a detailed analysis of the powerful players of the era, such as kings, queens, and prime minsters, and how they were depicted by the great painters and playwrights, including Tiziano, Velázquez, Rubens, Maíno, Lope, Tirso, Calderón, and Rojas Zorrilla.
SPN 671. Transatlantic Caribbean: Oceanic Literatures and the Idea of Hispanism
Prof. Lena Burgos-Lafuente
W 02:30-05:30PM in Humanities 2036
En 1982 el poeta Osvaldo Lamborghini afirmaba: “El océano Atlántico es una inmensidad
irreversible”. Cuarenta años antes, el encuentro entre un grupo de exiliadas y exiliados
que huían del franquismo, intelectuales de distintas partes de Europa que huían del
fascismo e intelectuales latinoamericanos y caribeños daban cuenta de dicha irreversibilidad
en la cuenca del Caribe.
Este curso pone en escena los diálogos fructíferos, truncos, tensos y complejos que surgieron en el Caribe hispano de las décadas de 1940 y 1950 a partir de estos choques, y el efecto que tuvieron tanto en las poéticas de autoras y autores del momento como en los discursos institucionales que impulsaron. ¿Qué nos dicen estas colaboraciones y desencuentros sobre las nociones de tiempo, escucha, inmunidad, experiencia, negatividad y otros conceptos anclados en el pensamiento de la posguerra?
Este momento histórico tuvo como uno de sus resultados la creación académica del hispanismo. Exploraremos las genealogías de la noción de hispanismo en tanto campo de saber; indagaremos en los debates, apuestas políticas, mercantiles e intelectuales que se jugaron en la formación de la disciplina y discutiremos qué nociones y jerarquías se han heredado de esa coyuntura.
El curso está estructurado a partir de intervenciones de ambos lados del Atlántico. Se incluirán textos de Juan Ramón Jiménez, Nilita Vientós Gastón, José Lezama Lima, Francisco Ayala, Zenobia Camprubí, Harriet de Onís, Federico de Onís, Pedro Salinas, María Zambrano, Francisco Matos Paoli, Julia de Burgos, Manuel Altolaguirre, Aída Cartagena Portalatín, Rubén del Rosario y Margot Arce entre otras figuras del entorno. La lectura de este corpus pretende dar cuenta de la singularidad y la especificidad de los circuitos literarios caribeños, así como señalar posibles continuidades que no estén circunscritas a los marcos nacionales e insulares que estructuran la disciplina. Con ello se busca propiciar un acercamiento más complejo a los vínculos literarios y teóricos entre Europa, el Caribe, los Estados Unidos y Latinoamérica.
SPN 693 Practicum in Teaching of Spanish
Prof. Lilia Ruiz-Debbe
MW 08:30-09:50AM in HUMANITIES 2036
This course is to be taken in conjunction with the student’s teaching assignment.
Each week’s discussion centers on problems of applied linguistics or grammar. Discussion
will also be focused on methodology (audio-lingual method, pattern drills, language
laboratory, and preparation of examinations).
WINTER 2020
SPN 503: Spanish Linguistics. Spanish for Medical Professions. (Graduate MA, 3 credits). ONLINE
Major issues related to the general structure of the Spanish language. The Spanish for Medical Professionals course is designed for healthcare providers or those working in a related area, such as medical technology or social work in the healthcare field. See poster for full description.
FALL 2019
SPN 510 / 405 Disabled Bodies, National Politics
Aurélie Vialette. Wednesday 5:30-8:30 pm
This course will focus on the disabled body in nineteenth century Iberian cultural production. Who was considered disabled and what were the consequences of being discriminated as such? We will study medicine treatises, fiction, paintings, essays, military portraits and pamphlets to see the entanglements of race, nation, masculinity, the poor and the marginalized at that time. We will see how masculinity was idealized and projected the notion of a strong Spanish Empire throughout the world. Of particular interest will be the study of military masculinity, disabled male bodies (“useless men”), racial dynamics and discrimination. In addition, we will pay attention to the disabled poor, whose body was considered “useless” for modernity. We will examine politics of discrimination against the vagrants’, the poor’s and the prostitutes’ bodies, which the political power was trying the dispose of. This course will also include a profound analysis of the main scholarship in disabilities studies in academia. Fall, 3 credits, ABCF grading
SPN 506 Bilingualism
Lilia Ruiz-Debbe. Tuesday 5:30-8:30 pm
This graduate course is an introductory study of bilingualism that explores theories about bilingualism, bilingualism and cognition, bilingualism and second language acquisition, bilingual memory, heritage language learners, and bilingual education. Fall, 3 credits, ABCF grading
SPN 612 Topics Seminar: “Women’s Cinema in Spain and Latin America”
Kathleen Vernon. Wednesday 4:30-7:30 pm
What does it mean to posit a tradition of women’s cinema in the Spanish-speaking world? In this course we will explore the role of women in cinema from Latin America and Spain as this role has changed over time, and as it takes varied forms in different nations and regions. We will establish a critical, theoretical and historical framework for understanding the limits on women’s access to film directing and to exhibition of their work. We will then raise a number of questions having to do with themes women address and how these have shifted: the political issues (individual and collective) their films raise, the choice and uses of film genres, and the increasing transnationalism women’s films both address and participate in. The goals of the course are multiple. Students will develop their skills in film analysis as part of a broader cultural inquiry into the role of gender in cultural, social and ideological experience both within and across national and regional boundaries. A practical, pedagogical component will seek to aid students in developing and refining their skills in teaching and writing on film. Note: This course is also open to student with no Spanish proficiency. Fall, 3 credits, ABCF grading
SPN 662 19th Century Spanish –Amerian Literature. “Imagining Amazonia: bodies, labor, nature”
Javier Uriarte. Thursday 2:30-5:30 pm
Throughout the centuries, the Amazon River basin has been central in the imagination of travelers, writers, State officials, soldiers, and adventurers. This enormously rich cultural space has been the subjects of all kind of narratives since the colonial times. These narratives are very diverse, even sometimes contradictory, but have consistently constructed Amazonia as a mysterious, dangerous, and inscrutable space. This has fueled, of course, the imagination of many writers, and has posed the jungle as the space where danger, adventure, the unknown and the fantastic appear together. The jungle, as we will see, is the space of the exceptional par excellence.
In this course we will try to approach the immense complexity and richness that the representations of the Amazonian space have adopted throughout this last two centuries. This extraordinary complexity can be explained by the fact that this space is shared by eight different South American countries. Not just Spanish and Portuguese are spoken in these lands, but also English, and innumerable indigenous languages, some of them threatened with extinction. The several indigenous communities (with their diverse cultures and languages) living in this space (some of which still have not yet encountered so called civilized men) significantly add to the cultural dynamics of these region. This explains in part that we are going to read texts in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. One of the central ideas that has organized this course is that the Amazonian space can only be understood if a strong comparative approach is adopted. The Amazon as discourse is in part a product of many texts, it is in itself a Babel tower.
Some of the key questions that we are going to discuss and try to respond during the semester deal with the construction of this space through the eyes of what has been called “informal empire” (Gallagher and Robinson), or just neocolonialism. How these lands have been imagined by the logic of conquest and exploitation? How have them been transformed by this logic? How can we connect the representation of the jungle with the notions of uneven development and the production of space, discussed by Marxist geographers (Lefebvre, Harvey, Smith)? We will also focus on how the Amazonian space has been represented from the perspective of the Nation-State. In this respect, we will discuss some key concepts in the cultural history of Latin America, such as those of frontier, margin, and desert. What is the significance of the jungle in the imagination of the Nation-State? What is the status of these territories within the sovereign space of the State? Is this space appropriable, exploitable, transformable, dangerous or fragile? Is this a space against which the State must fight or, on the contrary, one for which it has to fight (against –possible, imagined or concrete– foreign invaders)? How is the Amazon region conceived in terms of movement, speed, and visibility? What role does it play in the famous dichotomy between civilization and barbarism? How is it related to war, danger and national security? How is the body described and imagined in the Amazonian space? We are going to be discussing the connotations that disease and fever (and madness and hallucinations) adopt in many of these narratives.
In order to discuss these theoretical problems we will read authors such as Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Roger Casement, William Henry Hudson, Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace, Theodore Roosevelt, Horacio Quiroga, José Eustasio Rivera, Rómulo Gallegos, Alejo Carpentier, Mario Vargas Llosa, William Ospina, Euclides da Cunha, Alberto Rangel, Márcio Souza, Milton Hatoum. An important theoretical component of the class will deal with the field of environmental studies. Theoretical and critical readings will include Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Philippe Descola, James C. Scott, Deleuze and Guattari, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Neil Smith, Ana Pizarro, Margarita Serje, Michel Foucault, Flora Sussekind, Francisco Foot Hardman, Ileana Rodríguez, etc. Fall, 3 credits, ABCF grading
SPN 691 Practicum in the Teaching of Spanish Language.
Theory and practice of language teaching. Applied methodology and linguistics in classroom situations specifically geared to Spanish as Second Language. Explore two issues of L2 learning: the role of explicit instruction and input and classroom interaction, and the basic principles of second language acquisition. Acquire knowledge of the second language learning processes as observed in the diverse group of bilingual students of the Elementary Spanish class at the College Level A required course for teaching assistants. Prerequisite: Permission of instructor, Department Chair, or graduate program director. Fall, 3 credits, ABCF grading.
SPN 693 Practicum in The teaching of Spanish Language II
Apply current methodologies of applied linguistics as they relate to Spanish language teaching. Explore a variety of teaching techniques in the skills areas: reading, comprehension, writing, and speaking. Experience in microteaching, what to teach and how to teach it in particular situations. A required course for teaching assistants. Prerequisite: Permission of instructor, Department Chair, or graduate program director. Fall and Spring 3 credits, S/U grading
SUMMER 2019
SPN 505 Hispanic Dialectology and Sociolinguistics. Spanish in the United States
Dr. Elena Davidiak. Mon & Weds 05:30-08:30PM Main Campus. May 28 to July 6th.
During this course we will discuss the processes specific of the Spanish language in the United States, including the existing varieties and the way they evolve and intermingle, the peculiarities of language registers and their areas of usage and the relationship between Spanish and English and Spanish and other minority languages and between the dialects of Spanish, as well as the varieties of societal and personal bilingualism, the official and informal status of Spanish and the needs of its speakers. (3 credits)
SPN 585: Caribbean Literature Seminar
Graduate 3 credits. Dr. Zaida Corniel. Hours: Flexible (Online). July 6th to August 17th.
The Caribbean has been represented as a military frontier, a port for the global market or an imaginary space for reinvention. Moreover its borders have been blurred due to the recent development of the cruise tourism, and the mass migration of its inhabitants, internally in the region and to the United States and Europe. This course aims to analyze texts, visual art and films that shift national and gender identities through a transnational dialog between Caribbean authors and artists in the United States, and the islands of Cuba, The Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Readings and board discussions will address topics such as bilingualism, citizenship, gender, identity, and race, among others. Seminar will be taught in Spanish. (3 credits)
SPRING 2019 See S19 PDF
SPN 523 Golden Age Literature: Mujer y poder en el teatro español del siglo XVII
TU 5:30pm–8:30pm. Prof. V. Roncero- Lopez
En la sociedad europea del siglo XVII la mujer jugaba un papel secundario, la mayoría
de las ocasiones supeditada a la autoridad masculina. Sin embargo en la comedia española
de esta época no siempre aparece la mujer como personaje secundario, sino que en muchas
de ellas se convierte en el motor de la acción, en la persona que mueve los hilos
y controla la acción, sometiendo al hombre a su poder. En el curso vamos a analizar
varias obras de Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderón y otros autores, en cuyas
obras la mujer juega un papel fundamental, tanto en el ámbito doméstico como en el
público, en dramas como en comedias.
SPN 609 Literary Theory
TH 02:30-05:30PM
This course is an in-depth introduction to literary and cultural theory organized
around some of the central questions that animate discussions among literary and cultural
scholars today. We will review a variety of theoretical perspectives produced in different
times and locations, and place special emphasis on theoretical discourses and practices
in and about Latin America, Spain and the Latinx US. Questions explored in the course
will include the role of culture in shaping structures of power, the study of the
links between literature, ideology, and the mechanisms of hegemony, the study of the
colonial and post-colonial conditions, the social workings of categories such as race,
class and gender, the role of culture and literary production in market centered societies,
the political implications of aesthetics, the use and politics of cultural memory,
the status of theory in the literary and cultural professions.
This semester, the class will be taught collectively by several Hispanic Languages and Literature faculty, who will present theoretical and methodological approaches that they have found especially productive in their own work in cultural studies, trans-Atlantic and inter-American studies, cinema and sound studies, race and postcolonial studies, migration, indigeneity studies, gender and sexuality studies, the theory and practice of critical editions (textual criticism), and digital humanities.
SPN 612 Topics Seminar: Protest and Disobedience
W 4:30pm–7:30pm. Prof. Aurelie Vialette
This course is designated to explore the practices of protest in 19th century Iberia.
To that end, we will particularly pay attention to the concept of disobedience. What
does it mean to disobey? And what does it imply? Is protesting always a form of disobedience
in the 19th century? What are the many manifestations of disobedience? And of protesting?
We will discuss cultural and political productions from this period in order to understand
theoretically, culturally and historically why and how a people protest and which
social and political implications it has in modern societies . Of particular interest
will be the construction of political subjects; working class demands of recognition
in the political sphere; feminist ideology and demands of visibility/agency for women;
and social movements mechanisms. Silent underground protesting will also be part of
our concern.
Students will:
1. Write response papers in a blog every two weeks,
2. Prepare two in-class presentations,
3. Participate in a colloquium at the end of the semester (organized by the professor),
4. Write a final research paper on nineteenth century protest and disobedience in
the Iberian Peninsula.
Attendance and participation are mandatory.
SPN 662: 19th Century Spanish American Literature: Flesh, Bodies and Consumption
M 4:30pm–7:30pm. Prof. Joseph Pierce
In the Western Imaginary Latin America has been intrinsically linked to abundant natural
resources, mythical and monstrous creatures, sensuality, and danger. Latin America
is a place of consumption: to consume and be consumed. This course examines what “consuming”
means as a trope and ideological construct, but also as an embodied, lived experience.
We will approach the Colonial era cannibal. The 19th century bandit, the 20th century
market speculator, and 21st century globalization as sharing a drive to consume that
is characteristic of a region defined by excess. This course asks what drives, appetites,
and desires constitute Latin American consumption. We will read canonical works in
tandem with lesser-known works of fiction, autobiography, and memoir. We will engage
in a trans-historical method of reading and critique, though this course will focus
primarily on the 19th century era of nation-formation and the advancement of Liberal
ideologies of social economic value in Latin America.
SPN 693: Practicum in Teaching Spanish
TUTH 10:00am – 11:20. MW 8:30am – 9:50am. Prof. L. Ruiz Debbe
This course is to be taken in conjunction with the student’s teaching assignment.
Each week’s discussion centers on problems of applied linguistics or grammar. Discussion
will also be focused on methodology (audio-lingual method, pattern drills, language
laboratory, and preparation of examinations).
FALL 2018
POR 511: Portuguese for Spanish Speakers
Mondays 1-3:50 in Humanities 2036
Prof. Javier Uriarte
A one semester accelerated course in Brazilian Portuguese for students with a native of near-native command of Spanish. This course uses Spanish as a base for study of Portuguese grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. It will prepare students to read advanced materials as they will acquire a basic proficiency in speaking, writing and comprehension of standard Brazilian Portuguese. The course makes special emphasis on those aspects of Portuguese pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary that differ from Spanish. Students will also acquire a basic knowledge of central elements of Brazilian culture, both from a historical and contemporary perspective (specifically, elements from Brazilian cuisine, sports, geography, music). Finally, the course will provide students with an introductory and basic approach to canonical Brazilian literary works (poetry, short stories, journalism, chronicles), which will be discussed in dialogue with the students’ previous knowledge about Spanish American culture and literature. Proficiency in Spanish is required. Undergraduate students need authorization from instructor.
SPN 513: Spanish as Second Language Acquisition
Tuesdays 5.30-8.30 pm
Prof. Lilia Ruiz Debbe
The purpose of this course is to provide a framework on how language development in bilingual individuals is different from that of monolinguals. How people learn their first language (L1) and how they learn their second language (L2) and the relationship between the two languages. We will try to reach the theoretical questions about the presence of a second language in the same mind as a first language and how this pre-existing language affects the L2 user’s mind. Finally, we will understand the differences and similarities that have been proposed between L1 and L2 acquisition.
SPN 532 New Realities and New Realisms in Latin American Film
Wed. 5:30-8:30 pm, Melville Library N3085
Prof. Adrián Pérez Melgosa
This course explores a group of contemporary Latin American films which develop a variety of formal and narrative techniques in an effort to explore realistic ways to convey the complexities of their societies, of their connections local and global contexts, and their position in regards to dominant definitions of Latin America. Many of these new varieties of realism have developed as a reaction to the identification of Latin American art and literature with the development of magical realism. We will study the connections of these films to traditional Latin American filmmaking practices, and to the social and political debates that surround these practices. The course provides an introduction to the vocabulary of film production and criticism as well as to the theoretical concepts of film studies.
SPN 612 Scholarly Writing
Thursdays 2:30-5:30 pm
Prof. Daniela Flesler
Doctoral students today face increasing pressure to have peer-review publications before they enter the job market. This class will discuss the expectations of scholarly writing in the discipline of Iberian and Latin American literary and cultural studies, and how to situate our own writing in the academic debates that shape the discipline. We will read a variety of texts, including fiction and autobiography (for example, Juan Goytisolo’s novel Señas de identidad together with his autobiography Coto vedado, Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás) that reflect on the deeply personal, joyful and sometimes also anguish- ridden act of writing, and explore the possibilities of using the tools of literary and cultural analysis to examine different objects of study, alongside literary texts: exhibitions, museums, performances, monuments.
Beginning with a paper already written or an idea for one, we will work together during the semester to transform it into a publishable article. We will discuss practical matters of research, writing and publishing: sustaining writing as a long-term daily routine, drafting, editing and revising, the dialogue and exchange with scholars working on similar topics, situating our objects of study in their historical and social context, which kinds of journals are best to submit our work to.
The class will be conducted in Spanish. As a professionalization seminar centered on a critical examination of writing and its processes, the course’s objective is to serve as a bridge between the mostly content-based courses and the independent work expected in the dissertation. The class seeks to enable students to progress successfully through the PhD and to build their competitive advantage for the academic and all job markets.
SPN 652 Ruins and continuities in Andean narratives [Colonial Spanish American Literature]
Wednesdays 04:30-07:30 pm
Prof. Paul Firbas
This seminar and critical workshop will take early 20th century Andean studies, indigenismo, anthropology and archaeology (Luis Valcárcel, J. C. Tello and José María Arguedas) as a point of departure, and then move back in time to textualities produced during the 16th to 18th centuries in the region, focusing on problems of continuities (resistance), change (transformation) and mestizaje (transculturación, heterogeneidad), as well as on material culture (books, paper, stone) and the particularities of writing and text circulation in a colonial setting. The class will review current literary criticism, studies in coloniality of power and historiography, but it will mainly follow a critical philological approach. Main texts to be studied represent a diversity of agents and genres: chronicles, poems, letters, festival accounts, extirpation of idolatry and saintly narratives, official news sheets, cartography, etc. Seminar is taught in Spanish.
SPN 691: Practicum in the Teaching of Spanish Language
Mondays 2.00-5.00 pm
Prof. Lilia Ruiz Debbe
Theory and practice of language teaching. Applied methodology and linguistics in classroom situations. A required course for teaching assistants. Prerequisite: Permission of instructor, Department chair, or graduate program director.
SPRING 2018
SPN 506: Bilingualism
Prof. Elena Davidiak
Wednesdays from 6 to 9 pm
The aim of this course is to provide the students with an overview of the structure and functions of mixed speech, mainly in English and Spanish. Issues discussed during the course will include the concepts of language contact and language mixing, the structural aspect of switching between structurally related and unrelated languages, the constraints on code switching, the triggering hypothesis, footing, the relationship between speech and language identity, insider and outsider code, marked and unmarked speech, incomplete or hindered language acquisition.
SPN 551: Early Latin American Literature
Prof. Paul Firbas
Mondays from 5.30 to 8.30 pm
This course will provide an introduction to major texts of the colonial period and to narratives, poems, essays and films from the 20th and 21st century that revise the colonial legacies and study the vitality of the indigenous cultures in modern Latin America. Students will learn about the historical context and rhetorical traditions behind each text, letter, chronicle, poem, testimony or legal document to be studied. The class, taught in Spanish, will cover more than 400 years of cultural production in the Americas. Students will write 2 exams and 5 short quizzes (in class), and prepare a final group presentation. Authors or texts to be studied include: H. Cortés, Las Casas, Cabeza de Vaca, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Inca Garcilaso, Guaman Poma, Popol Vuh, Manuscrito de Huarochirí, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Siguenza y Góngora; J. M. Arguedas, Elena Garro, Rigoberta Menchú, Gabriel García Márquez, Alonso Cueto, Alejo Carpentier.
SPN 612: Travel Writing in Latin America: self, otherness, and the Nation-state
Prof. Javier Uriarte
Mondays from 5.30 to 8.30 pm
What is to travel? What is to write about travel? What particular configurations does the discourse of travel adopt in Latin America and in relation to its historical and political evolution? This course will focus on travelogues that have described Latin America, its inhabitants and its spaces, from the beginning of the nineteenth-century to the present. The nature of this course –as is the case, inevitably, with all travel writing– will be decidedly comparative. We will discuss the ways in which travel writing has historically contributed to imagining (and sometimes building) the self, the other, and the nation-state in Latin America. In order to do that, we will discuss the different forms of seeing (and of invisibility) that are displayed in these texts. We will establish a dialogue between perspectives, and we will explore the ideological, political, theoretical, or personal projects that inform the different travelogues.
SPN 613: Medieval Literature. 15th Century Spanish Love Poetri: Love, Politics and Laughter
Prof. V. Roncero López
Thursdays from 3 to 6 pm
Reading and analysis of some of the most well known poets of 15th century Castille (Santillana, Manrique, and Mena), as well as others less known but as important as the major poets (Villasandino, Imperial, Torrellas, Montoro, etc.). The course will focus in the political, cultural, and literary traditions that produced the “cancionero” poetry. The Provençal court poetry and its conception of the love as a reflection of the feudal society. The Castilian 15th century poetry as a result of the arrival of a new nobility in desperate need for social prestige. We will analyze the political turmoil of that century and the response of different poets (Santillana, Manrique, Mena) to this new and complicated power struggles. And finally the use of the humor as a way of dealing with the social, economic, and political changes in 15th century Castille.
SPN 671: 20th Century Spanish American Literature
Prof. Lena Burgos-Lafuente
How can we define the twentieth century? Where does it begin? Where does it end? Can we speak of a certain sensibility that is unique to the twentieth century? What were its aesthetic and political stakes?
Antonio Benítez Rojo and Édouard Glissant, two distinguished thinkers of Caribbean aesthetics, proposed the concepts of the repeating island and the poetics of relation to explicate the particularity and contemporaneity of the Caribbean region. Taking into account Benitez Rojo’s and Glissant’s lead, while challenging it at the same time, this course sets out to think the past century from the literary production of the Caribbean. Better put, we will seek to explore how the century emerged as a conscious endeavor from the Caribbean, how the century thought itself into being from this time and place. Instead of proceeding by strict chronological order or discrete accounts of national traditions, we will focus on questions of temporality (anachronisms, contemplation of ruins, nostalgia and melancholia), writing and experience, fascism, war, communism, the unconscious, the avant-gardes, and archipelagic thought. The literary and cultural production of Cuba, Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic will illuminate key continuities and divergences constitutive of the relation between politics and aesthetics in the 20th century.
Authors might include Virgilio Piñera, Alejo Carpentier, Julia de Burgos, Luis Palés Matos, Antonio S. Pedreira, José Lezama Lima, Lorenzo Homar, Aida Cartagena Portalatín,Freddy Prestol-Castillo, and Antonio José Ponte. We will also read essays by David Scott, Michel Rolph- Trouillot, Rubén Ríos Ávila, Alain Badiou, Hannah Arendt, María Zambrano, Julio Ramos, and Roberto Esposito among others.
FALL 2017
SPN 503: Spanish Linguistics: Current Issues for Spanish Heritage Speakers and Second Language
Learners in formal classroom settings
Prof. Lilia Ruiz Debbe
TU 5:30-8:30 p.m.
This course will focus on the Spanish Heritage Speaker and the L2 learner, specifically on the cognitive and linguistic processes that determine the route of acquisition, rate of acquisition, cross-linguistic influences, and the interlanguage variability.
SPN 542: Crime and Punishment: The Making of the Criminal
Prof. Aurélie Vialette
Wed. 5:30-8:30 p.m.
In this course, we will examine the question of criminality in nineteenth century Spain. The title implies that the criminal was made, or “fabricated”, and was considered a social enemy. In effect, we will see how at that time, part of the population was socially marginalized and excluded from the access to citizenship because its forms of coexistence did not fit into the social order imposed by the new capitalist society. These persons were considered “deviants” and were: the worker, the criminal, the prostitute, the homosexual, the gypsy, the beggar. We will explore the following topics: juvenile delinquency, the conflicts between industrialists and the working class (especially Anarchism), the projects of social hygiene, the politics of social control targeted at prostitutes, beggars, gypsies, and the poor, among others. Readings will include theoretical texts (Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, etc), critical books (Akiko Tsuchiya, Pura Fernández, etc) and nineteenth century documents (legal texts, essays, ephemera, novels, etc).
Our readings and discussions will help us to talk about important contemporary issues: mass incarceration, gender and racial oppression, social inequality, among others. Some of the readings will address these issues directly. As such, we will make connections between Spain and contemporary United States.
SPN 612. Thirst: Sex and Being
Joseph Pierce
Wed. 4:00-7:00 p.m.
This course will investigate diverse ways of desiring, embodying sensuality, and being. It is about the appetites that populate our lives—on which we depend for survival—, as well as those that have inspired historical moments of conflict and resolution. Thirst in this course is as much about lived experiences of desire as it is about historical structures of race, class, gender, colonialism, art, and philosophy. Our inquiry into this thirst will focus on 19th and 20th century Latin American prose, and will also incorporate thirsty queer texts from both the US and Latin America. The thirst is real.
SPN 643: Buñuel, Ripstein, Almodóvar
Prof. Katy Vernon
TH 2:30-5:30 p.m.
This course will focus on the films and careers of three of the most provocative and influential Hispanic directors of the last 90 years, Luis Buñuel, Arturo Ripstein and Pedro Almodóvar. In analyzing each of their distinctive film universes, we will also consider a series of shared concerns: their participation in a model of hybrid, transnational cinema; their pursuit of socially and sexually transgressive themes; and their creative if conflictive relation to various traditions of both Hispanic and wider global cultures.
The course will be conducted in Spanish but all films will have English subtitles and the readings will be available in English.
SPN 691: Spanish Teaching Practicum
Prof. Lilia Ruiz Debbe
Mon. 2:00-5:00 p.m.
Theory and practice of language teaching. Applied methodology and linguistics in classroom settings. A required course for teaching assistants.
SPRING 2017
SPN 505: Hispanic Dialectology and Sociolinguistics: Spanish in the United States
Prof. E. Davidiak
Wednesdays from 6:00-9:00pm
This course focuses on the Spanish language in the United States as a sociolinguistic phenomenon. It covers topics such as bilingualism, heritage language, language acquisition and use by first and second generation speakers, language contact phenomena that surge as a result of the coexistence of English and Spanish and the many regional varieties of Spanish, language and identity, language authority and language attrition and loss due to sociopolitical and personal factors.
SPN 573: Studies in Modern Latin American Literature: Cultural Representations of War in Latin
America (19th – 21st centuries)
Prof. Javier Uriarte
Mondays from 6:00-9:00 pm
How is space conceived through the lens of war? What is the relationship between the Latin American state and war? How have some of the key wars of the 19th century been represented from a 20th or 21st century perspective? This course will discuss several approaches to conflicts during the 19th century as represented by travelers, intellectuals, soldiers, and painters in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Colombia and Mexico. We will then compare these 19th century perspectives to those adopted in contemporary Latin American literature and cinema. Some of the writers that we will read are Esteban Echeverría, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Euclides da Cunha, Estanislao Zeballos, Mario Vargas Llosa, Augusto Roa Bastos, César Aira. We will discuss films by Glauber Rocha, Andrés di Tella, Sergio Rezende, among others.
SPN 609: Literary and Cultural Theory: Global Questions, Hispanic Contexts
Prof. A. Pérez Melgosa
Mondays from 2:30-5:50pm
This course is an in depth introduction to literary and cultural theory. In it we will learn about a number of the central questions that animate discussions among literary and cultural scholars today and the many theories that attempt to answer them. We will review a variety of theoretical perspectives produced across various times and locations, and place special emphasis on theoretical discourses and practices originating in Latin America and Spain as well as how scholars in these regions have incorporated, modified and enhanced theories produced abroad. Questions explored in the course will include: the role of culture in shaping structures of power, the study of the links between literature, ideology, and the mechanisms of hegemony, theories of the unconscious in artistic, political and cultural production, the study of the colonial and post-colonial conditions, the social workings of categories such as race, class and gender, the role of culture and literary production in market centered societies, the political implications of aesthetics, the use of cultural memory, and the status of theory in the literary and cultural professions.
SPN 612: Topics Seminar: Inventing the carceral system: crime, politics and the remnants of
Empire
Prof. A. Vialette
Thursdays from 3:30pm – 6:30pm
This course examines, through critical analysis, the carceral system in the Iberian Peninsula (from the 19th century until the Franco dictatorship). We will focus on what was called the “penitentiary question”, that is, the penitentiary reforms, looking particularly at how intellectual reformists envisioned the existence of the prison buildings within the cities and in the colonies, how they faced the treatment of prisoners inside the prisons themselves as well as their social reintegration on release. Special attention will be given to the study of: architecture (the panopticon, for example), medical and hygienist discourses, poverty and social inequalities, youth delinquency, projects of rehabilitation through education and reading, among others. Gender will be an integral part of this course on two levels: first, we will closely examine women’s prisons and second, we will read social analysis by female intellectuals on these issues. We will also look at the cultural representations of the criminal through literature and film, and at the treatment of political prisoners during wars (the Gloriosa Revolution in 1868, the Civil War in 1936) and the Franco dictatorship. Finally, we will consider the issue of overseas prisons, especially in Cuba, the Philippines, Africa (Guinea Equatorial) and the Marianas in the nineteenth-century.
We will study a variety of sources: archival documents (correspondence, building plans, penal codes, etc), literary texts, music, paintings, films, documentaries, newspapers articles, among others. Classes will include discussions, audio-visual material, and students’ presentations.
Students will create a blog on SB You and be responsible to post weekly responses to the readings. They will also post their research and write their final paper on the blog.
SPN 652: Colonial Spanish American Lit. Textuality in the Extended Andes (1520 to 1620)
Prof. P. Firbas
Wednesdays from 3:00 – 6:00 pm
This doctoral seminar will study narratives, legal documents, epic poetry, maps and other forms of colonial textuality related to the extended Andean region in a transatlantic context, from early Spanish accounts to mestizo and indigenous narratives (1520 to 1620). Structured as a workshop, the seminar will focus on the language of each text (vocabulary, rhetoric, poetics), the cultural debates in which they were produced, as well as the history of their materiality and transmission (manuscripts and printed editions). Textual discussion will be accompanied by readings in cultural criticism, ethno-history and colonial and post-colonial Latin American studies. Main authors to be studied include: Jerez, Cieza de León, Las Casas, Ercilla, Oña, Cabello Balboa, Acosta, Tito Cusi Yupanqui, Inca Garcilaso, Guaman Poma, Tomé Hernández and José de Arriaga.
SPN 693: Practicum in Teaching of Spanish
Prof. L. Ruiz Debbe
Tu Th 10:00am – 11:20am and M W8:30am – 9:50am
This course is to be taken in conjunction with the student’s teaching assignment. Each week’s discussion centers on problems of applied linguistics or grammar. Discussion will also be focused on methodology (audio-lingual method, pattern drills, language laboratory, and preparation of examinations)