Courses

SPAN B001 Beginning Spanish I

Fall 2025

Develops basic communicative skills in both oral and written Spanish. Introduces students to different aspects of Hispanic and Latino cultures. Assumes no previous study of Spanish. The Tuesday class is a mandatory practice session with a teaching assistant.

Course does not meet an Approach

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SPAN B002 Beginning Spanish II

Spring 2026

Second course of the First-year Spanish language sequence. Designed to develop basic communicative skills in both oral and written Spanish. Students are exposed to different aspects of Hispanic and Latino cultures. The Tuesday class is a mandatory practice session with a teaching assistant. Students who receive a 3.3 or above in this course may enroll in SPAN 101 the following semester. Students who receive a 3.0 or less must take SPAN 100. Prerequisite: SPAN B001 or placement.

Course does not meet an Approach

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SPAN B100 Basic Intermediate Spanish

Fall 2025

A review of grammar with emphasis on all language skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing, with group activities and individual presentations. A variety of readings from the Hispanic world will be included. The course meets for five 50-minute sessions per week: three with the instructor, one with a TA on Monday evenings, and one mandatory study group session. Prerequisite: SPAN 002 or placement or instructor's permission.

Course does not meet an Approach

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SPAN B101 Intermediate Spanish

Fall 2025, Spring 2026

This course focuses on developing vocabulary and grammatical structures in all language skills in Spanish. A variety of readings from the Hispanic world will be included. The class meets three times a week with the instructor and there is one additional required 50-minute practice session with a teaching assistant on Monday evenings.

Course does not meet an Approach

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SPAN B102 Advanced Language Through Culture

Fall 2025, Spring 2026

This course stresses mastery of complex grammatical constructions through selected readings from the Spanish-speaking world in a global context: art, folklore, geography, literature, sociopolitical issues, and multicultural perspectives. Written and oral proficiency is emphasized, with special emphasis on reading and writing. The class meets three hours a week with the instructor and there is an additional required 50-minute practice session with a teaching assistant on Monday evenings. Prerequisite: SPAN 101 or placement or instructor's permission.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

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SPAN B120 Introducción al análisis literario

Fall 2025, Spring 2026

Readings from Spanish and Spanish-American works of various periods and genres (drama, poetry, short stories). Main focus on developing analytical skills with attention to improvement of grammar. This course is a requisite for the Spanish major. Prerequisite: SPAN 102, or placement. This course can satisfy the Writing Intensive (WI) requirement for the Spanish major. Critical Interpretation (CI). Counts toward Latin American, Iberian and Latina/o Studies.

Writing Intensive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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SPAN B205 Escritoras en la España contemporánea

Spring 2026

The course will focus on fiction written during the 20th and 21st century by women writers in Spain. We will study how the female subject is represented and constructed in these texts along historical events that have changed the country. Taking into account the political and social paradigms that dominate Spanish modern history and culture, we will explore how twentieth and twenty-first-century women writers negotiate the female subject in relation to earlier models of narration, identities (both self and regional), and social relationships. We will also look how these models have been challenged by a new wave of immigration and how it affects the social landscape of Spain. We will bring into the analysis and discussion of literary texts some of the issues addressed by feminist literary theory, such as language, canon formation, gender, and class. Finally, we will pay attention to the recovery of the country's feminist tradition, as well as current topics of social and political conflict that concern women in Spain.

Writing Intensive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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SPAN B208 Drama y sociedad en España

Not offered 2025-26

A study of the rich dramatic tradition of Spain from the Golden Age (16th and 17th centuries) to the 20th century within specific cultural and social contexts. The course considers a variety of plays as manifestations of specific sociopolitical issues and problems. Topics include theater as a site for fashioning a national identity; the dramatization of gender conflicts; and plays as vehicles of protest in repressive circumstances. Counts toward the Latin American, Latino and Iberian Peoples and Cultures Concentration. Prerequiste: SPAN B120; or another SPAN 200-level course. Critical Interpretation (CI). Inquiry into the Past (IP). Counts toward Latin American, Iberian and Latina/o Studies.

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SPAN B212 Representing Mexico: History, Politics, and Culture through Humor

Not offered 2025-26

This course will examine Mexican society through the lens of humor. Humorous production has a long history in Mexico, from the first Latin American novel, El Periquillo Sarniento by José Fernández de Lizardi, to the current representation of the "War on drugs". Hence, humor has served as a critical tool through which we can understand the country's reality-as it is perceived, imagined, and projected-, as well as its historical, social, and political implications. Through our readings and discussions, we will explore how humor has predominantly been used to question and delegitimize dominant discourses, but, at the same time, it has served to uphold the status quo in some of its representations. Likewise, our course materials will highlight how humor has served as a medium to advocate for greater democratizing practices, such as women's integration into the sociopolitical sphere. We will approach humor and its representation of Mexican society in a variety of formats such as: narrative, chronicle, essay, theater, film, political cartoon, and performance. Prerequisites: SPAN B120; or SPAN 200-level course or placement

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SPAN B216 Introducción a la lingüística hispánica

Not offered 2025-26

A survey of the field of Hispanic linguistics. We will explore the sounds and sound patterns of Spanish (phonetics and phonology), how words are formed (morphology), the structure and interpretation of sentences (syntax and semantics), language use (pragmatics), the history and dialects of the Spanish language, and second language acquisition. Prerequisite: SPAN B120 or permission of the instructor. Critical Interpretation (CI)

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Linguistics.

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SPAN B220 Escritoras, brujas y otros herejes

Not offered 2025-26

This course examines the evolution of gendered "otherness" through the diverse stories of women tried by the Inquisition in Spain, New Spain, Peru, and the Spanish Pacific. Throughout the Early Modern world, the Spanish Inquisition tried women of every social class and racial background for myriad charges of heresy, sexual misconduct, and witchcraft. In this course, students will gain a familiarity with major historical, cultural, and philosophical currents that shaped the Early Modern world while gaining critical skills required to engage the intricate primary sources that contain the stories of women who as believers, practitioners, writers, and artists, challenged ecclesiastical and colonial order throughout the transition to modernity. Students will engage women's writings that address themes of spirituality, religion, and doctrine from enclosure-from convents or imprisonment within the Inquisition's chambers. These writings include canonical authors and lesser-known authors such as Sor Juana and Santa Teresa of Ávila, Ursula de Jesús, María de Cazalla, and María de Jesús de Ágreda. Taught in Spanish.Prerequisite: panish 120 or SPAN 200-level course.

Writing Attentive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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SPAN B231 El cuento y novela corta en España

Not offered 2025-26

Traces the development of the novella and short story in Spain, from its origins in the Middle Ages to our time. The writers will include Pardo Bazán, Cervantes, Clarín, Don Juan Manuel, Matute, Zayas, and a number of contemporary writers such as Mayoral and Montero. Our approach will include formal and thematic considerations, and attention will be given to sociopolitical and historical contexts. Prerequiste: SPAN B120; or another SPAN 200-level course.

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SPAN B232 Encuentros culturales en América Latina

Fall 2025

This course introduces canonical Latin American texts through translation scenes represented in them. Arranged chronologically since the first encounters during the conquest until contemporary times, the readings trace different modulations of a constant linguistic and cultural preoccupation with translation in Latin America. Translation scenes are analyzed through close reading, and then considered as barometers for understanding the broader cultural climate. Special emphasis is placed on key notions for literary analysis and translation studies, as well as for linking the literary text with cultural, social, political, and historical processes. Prerequisite: SPAN B120 or another SPAN 200-level course.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: International Studies; International Studies.

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SPAN B241 Poetics of Social Justice: Minorities in Spain

Not offered 2025-26

This course, conducted in Spanish, is organized around political, cultural and social issues that concern ethnic minorities in Spain, particularly the Roma (gitanos) and the immigrants from Latin America and Africa. We will start by placing in its historical context the question of race and racism in Spain as a sociopolitical construct and a system of oppression. When studying the Roma people, we will discuss how flamenco art is a direct response to issues of discrimination and persecution, a means of resistance and a form of activism. At the same time that we will learn the basics of flamenco dance, we will consider the role of this art in areas such as religion, politics, and studies of race and gender. Our approach to immigration issues will consider topics of power relations, race, gender and class under new lenses such as decolonization, human rights and social justice. The readings in this course will include a diversity of original materials (plays, narrations, poetry, testimonies, newspaper articles, documentaries or films). Students will write reflections, analysis and responses on these texts, which will then be transformed into creative writing pieces such as dialogues, poems, short stories, blogs and other creative expressions, which will be shared with the class though presentations and performance.

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SPAN B243 Temas de la literatura hispana

Section 001 (Fall 2024): Imaginando los Andes
Section 001 (Fall 2025): La España picaresca

Fall 2025

This is a topic course. Topics vary. Prerequisite: SPAN B120; or another 200-level.

Current topic description: With wit, a bit of trickery, and biting social criticism, Spain's pícaros (rogue tricksters) narrate the harsh realities of an empire in decline. This course follows these notorious antiheroes through the grit and grime of 16th and 17th-century Iberian cities, critically engaging the picaresque genre as a tool for satirizing societal hypocrisy and exposing the decay festering behind Spain's imperial grandeur. Juxtaposing texts such as Lazarillo de Tormes and El buscón with La pícara Justina and La niña de los embustes,Teresa de Manzanares, students will interrogate how class, gender, and survival intersect in the lives of marginalized figures criminalized by society. Through satire, autobiography, and subversive storytelling, the course invites students to sharpen their critical voice in stripping back the gilded surface of the so-called "Golden Age."

Writing Intensive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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SPAN B244 Latinoamérica en shuffle: desde el Popol Vuh hasta la cumbia

Not offered 2025-26

The sacred book of the Quiché nation (present-day Guatemala), the Popol Vuh (circa 1544), begins as follows: "This is the account of how all was in suspense, all calm, in silence; all motionless, still, and the expanse of the sky was empty" (Recinos 81). The soundtrack of the beginning of the world, for the Quiché people, was silence. Almost five centuries after the Popol Vuh was written, the soundtrack of the world for Ulises, the protagonist of the Mexican film Ÿa no estoy aquí" (Frías 2020), is made up of the slowed-down cumbias he listens to in his MP3 as he crosses the U.S.-Mexico border. Beginning with Popol Vuh, and ending with "Ya no estoy aquí," this class will examine the uses of sound, silence, noise, and music in Latin American literature, film, paintings, and performance. During class, we will spend time examining the creative uses of sound, and the following questions will guide our readings: What is the sound of social interactions such as protests, insults, speeches, jokes, and mockery? Is silence a tool for policing, or a tool for escaping? What is the relationship between sound and the representation of gender, race, and ethnicity? How does technology shape the way we listen? Is noise a frontier between the human and the non-human? At the end of the semester, students will choose between curating a thematic playlist in Spanish using Spotify, producing a podcast about a work of literature/film/performance not studied in the course, or adapting a work examined during the semester using the radionovela format. Prerequisites: SPAN B120.

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SPAN B245 Los años del hambre en la España franquista

Not offered 2025-26

It has been estimated that in the period 1939-1944 alone, 200,000 people died in Spain directly or indirectly from starvation. Given such horrors, the 1940s were etched into people's memories as the "Hunger Years". Combining a historical approach with a theoretical framework of food studies, this course will explore opposing discourses on food and famine produced under Franco's regime and beyond, into democratic times. While presiding over great famine, the dictatorship's official propaganda crafted triumphalist rhetoric through gastronomic maps and essays, aiming to create a unified national identity and a sense of Spanishness while using 'autarky' as an effective political tool to secure the consensus of the victors and exclude the defeated from political life. However, memories of a starving society served as a weapon to counterbalance the dictatorship's-imposed truth and were widely represented in myriad fictional works from the 1940s until the 2000s in Iberian literatures. Through literature, historical narratives, films, paintings, popular cultures and social practices we will examine how memories of famine have been pivotal in Spanish fiction up to the years of democracy, and how in many of these 20th-century works, there are explicit or implicit intertextual references to the picaresque genre in both literature and painting from the Siglo de Oro. Prerequisite: SPAN B120 and another 200-level course, or permission of instructor.

Writing Attentive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

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SPAN B247 Gastropoeticas de la cultura latinoamericana

Not offered 2025-26

From Casta paintings to the current boom of social media foodies, the cultural representation of food and eating has historically served to create discourses about race, gender, class, and status. Theoretically grounded in food studies, in this class, we will study how food and foodways have structured cultural productions across Latin America. We will begin analyzing how indigenous communities assigned political and religious value to staples like corn or potatoes, followed by the uses of food-abundant and scarce-in colonial narratives like Naufragios by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. As a consequence of colonial enclaves, we will also study how Afro-descendant communities used food to negotiate their status in slaving societies and how forced migration ecologically affected Latin America. We will continue our analysis through the production of cookbooks during the height of conventual life (16th-18th centuries), as evidenced in the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. We will shift our attention to the 19th century, the rise of manuals about food placement and etiquette, and the construction of gender expectations through food consumption. We will end our examination of food cultures during the 20th and 21st centuries by examining the branding of Latin American cuisines as countries compete as sites for tourist consumption. Students will complete reflective journals, a personal cookbook zine, a field visit report to a local Latin American restaurant, and a final essay written in steps during the semester. As a Praxis course, students will be expected to complete 7-10 hours of community-engaged work with a local partner (TBD), ranging from a local food bank to organizations that work towards food security for Latinx communities.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Latin American Iberian Latinx; Praxis Program.

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SPAN B252 Compassion, Indignation, and Anxiety in Latin American Film

Spring 2026

Stereotypically, Latin Americans are viewed as "emotional people"--often a euphemism to mean irrational, impulsive, wildly heroic, fickle. This course takes this expression at face value to ask: Are there particular emotions that identify Latin Americans? And, conversely, do these "people" become such because they share certain emotions? Can we find a correlation between emotions and political trajectories? To answer these questions, we will explore three types of films that seem to have, at different times, taken hold of the Latin American imagination and feelings: melodramas (1950s-1960s), documentaries (1970s-1990s), and "low-key" comedies (since 2000s.) This course is offered in both Spanish and English. Prerequisite: SPAN 120 or permission of instructor

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Film Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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SPAN B307 Cervantes

Not offered 2025-26

A study of themes, structure, and style of Cervantes' masterpiece Don Quijote and its impact on world literature. In addition to a close reading of the text and a consideration of narrative theory, the course examines the impact of Don Quijote on the visual arts, music, film, and popular culture. Counts toward the Latin American, Latino and Iberian Peoples and Cultures Concentration. Prerequisite: at least one SPAN 200-level course. Course fulfills pre-1700 requirement and HC's pre-1898 requirement

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SPAN B309 La mujer en la literatura española del Siglo de Oro

Not offered 2025-26

A study of the depiction of women in the fiction, drama, and poetry of 16th- and 17th-century Spain. Topics include the construction of gender; the idealization and codification of women's bodies; the politics of feminine enclosure (convent, home, brothel, palace); and the performance of honor. The first half of the course will deal with representations of women by male authors (Calderón, Cervantes, Lope, Quevedo) and the second will be dedicated to women writers such as Teresa de Ávila, Ana Caro, Juana Inés de la Cruz, and María de Zayas. Prerequisite: at least one SPAN 200-level course. Course fulfills pre-1700 requirement and HC's pre-1898 requirement. Counts toward Gender and Sexuality Studies. Counts toward Latin American, Iberian and Latina/o Studies.

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SPAN B312 Latin American and Latino Art and the Question of the Masses

Fall 2025

The course examines the ways in which Latin American and Latino texts (paintings, murals, sculptures, and some narratives) construct "minor," "featureless" and "anonymous" characters, thus demarcating how and which members of society can and cannot advance a plot, act independently and/or be agents of change. By focusing the attention on what is de-emphasized, we will explore how artistic works, through their form, are themselves political actors in the social life of Latin America, the US, and beyond. We will also consider the place of Latin American and Latino Art in the US imaginary and in institutions such as museums and galleries. Prerequisites: Course is taught in English. Students seeking Spanish credit must have taken at least one Spanish course at the 200-level, or received permission from instructor. Course does not meet an Approach. Counts toward Latin American, Iberian and Latina/o Studies. Counts toward Museum Studies. Counts toward History of Art.

Writing Attentive

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: History of Art; International Studies; International Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx; Museum Studies.

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SPAN B313 Cultura, guerra y desarrollo en América Central

Spring 2026

How have artists used formal composition and experimentation to make sense of Central American crises and possibilities at different moments in time? This seminar introduces students to the interdisciplinary study of modern and contemporary Central American art and literature, through select case studies of the 20th and 21st century: from modernismo and avant garde fictions, to the Latin American Boom, then testimonial literature and visual culture, including Third World Cinema, followed by post-war novels, and lastly, contemporary art. Students will be asked to discuss through the course materials how artists at different moments in time contest the meanings of global phenomena, like war and development, but also, of artistic forms and genres from around the world. Course taught in Spanish. Prerequisite: one 200-level Spanish course.

Writing Attentive

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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SPAN B315 El futuro ya llegó: relatos del presente en América Latina

Not offered 2025-26

Taught in Spanish. In the 21st Century, "Here and now" is not what it used to be. There is no single "here" but instead multiple, coexisting realities (that of the cellphone, the street, the 'world'.) There's no clear present when the "now" is multiple. In this course we will explore 21st century Latin American shorts-stories, films, works of art, and novellas that synchronize with our contemporary circumstances---fictions and representations where realities alternate, identities flow, and the world appears oddly out of scale. As contemporaries, you will also be asked to write fictions about life "here and now." Throughout, we will keep two fundamental questions in mind: What is reality (here)? What is the contemporary (now)? Prerequisite: at least one SPAN 200-level course.

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SPAN B317 Poéticas de poder y deseo en el Siglo de Oro español

Not offered 2025-26

The poetry cultivated during the Renaissance and Baroque Spain was not an idle aesthetic practice. We discover in the rich poetic practice of the era preoccupations with historical, social and political themes, including discourses of power and empire, racial difference, and the representation of women as objects of desire. In addition, we will consider the self-fashioning and subjectivity of the lyric voice, theories of parody and imitation, and the feminine appropriation of the male poetic tradition. Although the course will deal primarily with the poetry of Spain, readings will include texts from Italy, France, England, and Mexico. Taught in Spanish. Prerequisites: at least one 200-level course.

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SPAN B326 Voces trasplantadas: teoría y práctica de la traducción

Not offered 2025-26

Taught in Spanish. Translation has been argued to be both impossible and inevitable. Theoretically impossible, because no two languages are perfectly equivalent; practically inevitable, because cultures, and human beings, are constantly interpreting one another--and understanding themselves in the process. This course is an introduction to translation as a practice with linguistic, literary, and cultural implications. It is organized in three steps. We will begin by exploring the linguistic aspect of translation: the theories (and myths) about language difference and equivalence, and how they can be put into practice. Then we will focus on translating literary texts of different genres (from canonical epics to film, from poems to short stories and proverbs), and we will simultaneously examine how the various types of texts have spurred very different opinions about what is a good or bad translation, what is desirable, and what is not. Finally, we will trace the role of translation in cultural exchanges, as well as its defining presence in contemporary debates on "world literature." Prerequisite: At least one 200 level Spanish course.

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SPAN B330 La novela de formación femenina en América Latina

Not offered 2025-26

Perhaps the most successful novelistic genre is the Bildungsroman or "coming-of-age": novels that follow the development of a person from youth to adulthood, from inexperienced to mature. But what happens when these protagonists are women, often facing the hurdles of societies that impede or limit growth and choice? Since the 19th Century, Latin American female authors have explored the struggles of "growth" and the various models of womanhood available in their societies. In this course, we will read a total of six Latin American Bilgunsromane of the 19th, 20th, and 21st century written by women authors from various countries. We will look at normative definitions and expectations of coming-of-age novels and how these authors created new options for themselves, for their characters, and for their readers.

Writing Intensive

Counts Toward: Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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SPAN B333 La invención de América: Escrituras europeas del Nuevo Mundo

Not offered 2025-26

Beginning in 1492, Spanish explorers, soldiers, and friars visited, noted, and imagined what they initially would call the New World. According to Alfonso Reyes, America was for Europe, rather than a sudden and new reality, a complete poetic invention. The astonished -pleased, marveled, horrified- writings of newly arrived Spaniards drew not only the real components of a vast and very different world from the European one, but also the fictional components: everything obscure, remote, or misunderstood that experience or the senses could not grasp, and the powers of imagination would. This course seeks to explore some of the key texts of the "invention of America" (Reyes) in the first centuries of the Conquest and Colonization. Our goal is to analyze how "the imperial eye" (Pratt) looked at and noted the American lands -its men and women, its cultures and wealth- projecting on them its oldest fears, fantasies, ambitions, and hopes: America was also "a new Europe", says Ángel Rosenblat, with all the political, literary and epistemic weight that such an idea implies. We will work with fragments of stories, chronicles, and poems on the following thematic axes: the first contacts, a rich and abundant nature (pearls, gold, silver, fish, fruits, spices, wood), the great Mesoamerican cultures, the Andean "empire", the extreme south and the eternal horizon, the interior lands and their immense rivers and mountains, the "bestiary of the Indies", the American myths (El Dorado, the Amazons) and some of the great and tragic historical native American figures as they were perceived and written by the Spaniards. Prerequisite: At least one SPAN 200 level course

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SPAN B334 Spain is different?: respuestas culturales al "overtourism" en España.

Spring 2026

The slogan "Spain is different" was coined during Franco's dictatorship in the 1960s as a promotional claim to market an exoticized parody of Spain's diverse culture-reduced to flamenco dancers, bullfighters, paella, and siestas-aimed at attracting northern European tourists. Since there was no democratic control over tourism development, construction took place without urban planning, causing damage along the entire Spanish Mediterranean coast. This trend was perpetuated by subsequent democratic governments and has shaped the economic, urban, and ecological landscape of Spanish society today. In recent years, there has been a shift in Spanish society, which no longer views tourism as a source of wealth but rather as a driver of economic precariousness, urban gentrification, and environmental destruction. In this course, combining critical analysis, historical inquiry, and postcolonial and ecocritical approaches, we will read novels and watch films from the second half of the 20th century to the present that serve as a cultural response to the social dangers of overtourism. Prerequisite: 200-level SPAN course.

Writing Intensive

Counts Toward: Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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SPAN B336 Afro-Diasporic Networks in Latin America

Not offered 2025-26

This interdisciplinary seminar will center the artistic and intellectual production of Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx thinkers across the Americas from 1492 to the present day. The class will be divided into four thematic units: Time, Space, Memory, and the Body. In each thematic unit, we will first read about how Black thinkers have theorized those concepts, and then we will analyze primary texts that dialogue directly with said theme. For example, during the Space unit, we will read the work of Afro-Brazilian geographer Milton Santos. Then we will read the novel by Afro-Colombian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella Chambacú corral de negros (1963), paying particular attention to issues of space. Course is taught in Spanish.

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SPAN B338 El derecho a vivir en paz: activismos en español

Not offered 2025-26

This advanced Spanish course is designed to help students reach advanced proficiency levels by engaging with case studies from law, social work, activism, and literature from Latin American and Latinx communities. Through community partners, students will engage with the multi-tasking requirement inherent to law and social work organizations that advocate for social justice. Our class will be divided into six different units, centering and problematizing the possibilities of advocacy: human rights, Latinx communities, Indigenous communities, Afro-descendant communities, women/femme/feminisms, and LGTBQI communities. We will read and listen to advocates from each of those communities and analyze how advocacy intersects with various forms of identity, political power, and artistic expression. This class has a service-learning component in addition to the work in the classroom, so you will need to complete at least 10 hours of work with a local partner. Your work with the local organization will be essential for you to start theorizing about advocacy through your own experiences. Prerequisite: SPAN B120 or SPAN 200-level course

Course does not meet an Approach

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Latin American Iberian Latinx; Praxis Program.

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SPAN B348 Ficciones de la confesión en la literatura española

Not offered 2025-26

Viewing the form of confession as a vehicle for both truth and fiction, this course engages the embedded politics of Early Modern confessional production to examine notions of agency, exploitation, and representation in a diverse selection of confessional works. As a textual conceit, confession ties together a broad array of narrative forms: autobiography, eye-witness accounts, medieval narrative poetry, hagiography, colonial chronicles, picaresque novels, mystical writings, theological treatises, testimonials, novels, and Inquisitorial archives. In this course students will hear the stories of pirates, non-gender-conforming surgeons, nuns, Inca kings, enslaved women and more. Through these testimonies, students will gain familiarity with the foundational history, literature, and theory related to the study of early modernity. Prerequisite: SPAN 120 or one 200-level course.

Writing Attentive

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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SPAN B349 La imaginación rural y medioambiental en España

Not offered 2025-26

How do contemporary writers, artists, and filmmakers engage aesthetically with a damaged national landscape? What are the ongoing effects, within a climate change scenario, of the Franco regime's fascist policies, such as intensive eucalyptus plantations and the construction of hydraulic structures that dammed half of the river flows, making Spain the first country in Europe in terms of reservoirs? Why doesn't the 1978 democratic Constitution include the word "landscape"? What metaphors have been used to both represent, reshape, and caricaturize, from an urban perspective, the rural communities in Spain including both the national rural bumpkin and the migrant laborers? These are some of the questions that will be explored in this course, which focuses on rural migrations, class and race conflicts, fascist and capitalistic extractivism, historical memory, and our current socio-ecological crisis. Throughout films, novels, and land art (by Spanish, Galician, Catalan and Basque authors) we will examine the historical continuities and discontinuities of environmental cultures in Spain from the end of the 19th century, when the rural exodus began, to the present day when the transformation of rural areas into renewable energy hubs exacerbates Spain's urban-rural divide. Prerequisite: one SPAN 200-level course.

Writing Attentive

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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SPAN B360 El metaverso de Cien años de soledad: entre la novela y Netflix

Fall 2025

Fifty-seven years ago, the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez submitted his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude to the Sudamericana publishing house in Buenos Aires (Argentina), and the rest is literature. Since then, the novel by García Márquez has sold more than forty million copies and has been translated into thirty-nine languages; it is not an exaggeration to suggest One Hundred Years of Solitude has changed the course of Latin American literature. Since its publication, the novel by García Márquez has been assigned in hundreds of history classes across universities in the United States to illustrate through literature political changes in Latin America, from colonization to state formation to the arrival of media technologies like the radio or cinema. In this class, we will read each of the four-hundred and seventy-one pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, paying equal attention to the literary devices that make this novel so unique and the power to evoke political change inherent to the book. Students will participate in a digital humanities project combining literary analysis and socio-political examination of the novel. We will examine the novel's architecture in detail, reviewing the influence of the bible, vallenato, cumbia, Virginia Woolf, Wayuu Indigenous communities, and Afro-Caribbean storytelling. As part of our inquiry, we will consider García Márquez's recently digitized archive at the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas Austin). At the end of the semester, we will conclude our analysis by studying the Netflix adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and we will assess what both the novel and the series can tell us about the limits of fiction. Prerequisite: 200-level SPAN class.

Writing Attentive

Counts Toward: Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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SPAN B398 Senior Seminar

The study of special topics, critical theory and approaches with primary emphasis on Hispanic literatures. A requirement for all Spanish Majors. Some topics and readings will be prepared in consultation with the students.

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SPAN B403 Supervised Work

Independent reading, conferences, and a long paper; offered to senior students recommended by the department.

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COML B213 Theory in Practice: Critical Discourses in the Humanities

Spring 2026

What is a postcolonial subject, a queer gaze, a feminist manifesto? And how can we use (as readers of texts, art, and films) contemporary studies on animals and cyborgs, object-oriented ontology, zombies, storyworlds, neuroaesthetics? By bringing together the study of major theoretical currents of the 20th century and the practice of analyzing literary works in the light of theory, this course aims at providing students with skills to use literary theory in their own scholarship. The selection of theoretical readings reflects the history of theory (psychoanalysis, structuralism, narratology), as well as the currents most relevant to the contemporary academic field: Post-structuralism, Post-colonialism, Gender Studies, and Ecocriticism. They are paired with a diverse range of short stories across multiple language traditions (Poe, Kafka, Camus, Borges, Calvino, Morrison, Djebar, Murakami, Ngozi Adichie) that we discuss along with our study of theoretical texts. We will discuss how to apply theory to the practice of interpretation and of academic writing, and how theoretical ideas shape what we are reading. The class will be conducted in English, with an additional hour taught by the instructor of record in the target language for students wishing to take the course for language credit.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Africana Studies; East Asian Languages & Culture; English; French and Francophone Studies; German and German Studies; History of Art; Italian and Italian Studies; Philosophy; Russian; Spanish.

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ENGL B217 Narratives of Latinidad

Fall 2025

This course explores how Latina/o writers fashion bicultural and transnational identities and narrate the intertwined histories of the U.S. and Latin America. We will focus on topics of shared concern among Latino groups such as struggles for social justice, the damaging effects of machismo and racial hierarchies, the politics of Spanglish, and the affective experience of migration. By analyzing a range of cultural production, including novels, poetry, testimonial narratives, films, activist art, and essays, we will unpack the complexity of Latinidad in the Americas.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Comparative Literature; Gender Sexuality Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx; Praxis Program; Spanish.

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ENGL B237 Cultural Memory and State-Sanctioned Violence in Latinx Literature

Spring 2026

This course examines how Latinx literature grapples with state-sanctioned violence, cultural memory, and struggles for justice in the Americas. Attending to the histories of dictatorship and civil war in Central and South America, we will focus on a range of genres-including novels, memoir, poetry, film, and murals-to explore how memory and the imagination can contest state-sanctioned violence, how torture and disappearances haunt the present, how hetereopatriarchal and white supremacist discourses are embedded in authoritarian regimes, and how U.S. imperialism has impacted undocumented migration. Throughout the course we will analyze the various creative techniques Latinx cultural producers use to resist violence and imagine justice.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Comparative Literature; Gender Sexuality Studies; International Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx; Spanish.

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GNST B145 Introduction to Latin American, Iberian and Latina/o Studies

Not offered 2025-26

A broad, interdisciplinary survey of themes uniting and dividing societies from the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas. The class introduces the methods and interests of all departments in the concentration, posing problems of cultural continuity and change, globalization and struggles within dynamic histories, political economies, and creative expressions. Course is taught in English.

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GNST B245 Introduction to Latin American, Iberian and Latina/o Studies

Not offered 2025-26

A broad, interdisciplinary survey of themes uniting and dividing societies from the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas. The class introduces the methods and interests of all departments in the concentration, posing problems of cultural continuity and change, globalization and struggles within dynamic histories, political economies, and creative expressions. Course is taught in English.

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