This course is conducted in English and will introduce students to the cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world through selected films, music and readings. In this interdisciplinary course, we will explore how filmmakers, musicians and writers respond to social and political changes in Angola, Brazil, Cabo Verde, Mozambique and Portugal. Topics covered include colonialism; postcolonialism; wars of independence in Africa; Brazil’s military dictatorship; Portugal´s New State dictatorship; evolving national identities; and representations of trauma and memory. Readings are in English and films have subtitles.

No textbook purchase needed.

An examination of the principal characteristics of the search for identity and independence of the emerging Latin American nations as expressed in literary, historical, and anthropological writing. We will examine the experience of each of four distinct regions: Mexico and Central America, the Caribbean, the Andean countries, and the Southern Cone. Readings will include the works of contemporary Latin American writers, filmmakers, and historians. Special attention will be given to the relationship between social issues and the evolution of literary form.

Beginning with Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin-American Nobel Laureate for Literature, this course focuses on the leading women poets in both Spain and the Americas. Central to this production are themes of human rights and social justice, gender, and the expression of love and desire. While the class will examine connections between women poets on both sides of the Atlantic, differences in terms of negotiating a male-dominated publication infrastructure will be examined. Other than Mistral, poets will include Concha Méndez, Rosa Chacel, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Clara Janés, Cristina Peri Rossi, Gloria Fuertes, and from the Americas, Delmira Agustini, Alfonsina Storni, Idea Villarino, Violeta Parra and others.

This course centers on connections between recent Latin American films and other media, especially audio archives, painting, installations, photography, and video. We will explore how such connections critique certain sociopolitical and cultural milieus that the selected films spring from, seek to represent, or both. Interdisciplinary readings will anchor our discussions as we focus on illuminating the films’ nuanced commentaries on local particularities - but also foreign influences - through the intersections of politics, agency, gender, and race. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Juan José Campanella, Fabián Bielinsky, Martín Rejtman, Paula Markovitch, Paz Encina, Jayro Bustamente, and Lucrecia Martel will be at the heart of the course. 

Introduction to listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Portuguese. Authentic cultural readings, art, music, and films from Angola, Brazil, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe and East Timor will be included. The course covers the full-year elementary language curriculum in one semester.

Review and expansion of all language skills and continued study of Lusophone art, music, film, and literature. Emphasis on oral and written expression and critical analysis. The course covers the full-year intermediate language curriculum in one semester.

Practice in oral and written Portuguese at the advanced level. Serves as a transition between language study and cultural studies through the examination of Lusophone cultural and artistic production. Designed to enhance communicative competence, this course will include a review of advanced grammatical structures within cultural contexts of the Lusophone world. Class discussions focus on the readings and films, as well as current events from around the Portuguese-speaking world. Oral interactions and critical writing will be stressed. All instructional materials provided by the instructor.

Topics will vary.

Research or Individual Study.
Topics, assessment, and reading will vary.

How did authors find ways to think about the self in the Iberian Peninsula? How do their lives and works relate to the transformation of Spanish and Portuguese into global languages? This course constitutes an introduction to the literary and cultural production of Spain and Portugal from 1492 to 1681. We will discuss why the works of this period are considered "classics" and have an enduring impact in the Hispanic world. Analysis of key texts will be accompanied by samples of painting and music. Topics include: the importance of concepts such as love and honor in the private and public spheres, the role of ethnic identities and political processes in the representation of the Iberian modern subject, women writers, and self-representation through writing.

This course explores how early modern Spanish and Portuguese literatures depict peoples and places perceived as foreign or other in relation to Spain and Portugal’s role as world powers in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. Places like Italy and England or social groups such as Spain's moriscos appear in Golden Age literature in complex, often surprising ways. We will analyze the historical and cultural processes that inform such representations and discuss how major works create meaning out of ethnic and cultural differences. Novels by Cervantes and María Zayas, plays by Calderón de la Barca, and poetry by Garcilaso and Camões will be discussed.

Introduction to spoken and written Spanish; stress on interactive approach. Extensive and varied activities, including oral presentations, cultural readings and recordings, and video resources.

Introduction to spoken and written Spanish; stress on interactive approach. Extensive and varied activities, including oral presentations, cultural readings and recordings, and video resources.

Intensive review of all language skills and introduction to the art, literature, and cultures of Spain and Latin America. Emphasis on oral and written expression and critical analysis.

Intensive review of all language skills and introduction to the art, literature, and cultures of Spain and Latin America. Emphasis on oral and written expression and critical analysis.

Practice in oral and written Spanish at the advanced level. Designed to enhance communicative competence, this course will provide an intensive review of advanced grammatical structures within cultural contexts of the Spanish-speaking world. Each section will explore a specific theme through the examination of Hispanic literary texts and the arts, as well as other cultural phenomena. Varied oral interactions, technological applications, and critical writing will be stressed.

Topics for Fall 2026:

The Marvelous in Latin American Literature and Culture; Instructor: Guzauskyte

This course explores the intersections between fantasy and reality in literary texts, art, film, cultural events, and digital content from various Spanish-speaking countries (Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, Uruguay, Colombia, Argentina, and Spain). Texts and materials to be studied range from pre-Hispanic indigenous myth and art, to works from colonial and contemporary periods. We will study how societies and individual authors have explored fantasy and imagination in their various forms including myth, fable, magic, superstition, miracle, hallucination, magic realism, and the fantastic. Course materials will include readings, works of art, film, and music. Focus on class discussions, public speaking, and student writing, both critical and creative. Ann E. Maurer '51 Speaking Intensive Course.

Art with a Cause in Modern Spain  From Goya to Rosalía; Instructor: Ramos

Artists in Spain have a long tradition of confronting violence and injustice as well as raising awareness, about pressing issues from the effect of wars on civilians to domestic abuse. This class will explore how modern Spanish artists have used their work to comment on and change minds about the thorniest matters of their time. Our analysis will range through many different forms of art, including painting, performance art, photography, graphic novels, film, and popular music.

Literature, Society and Politics; Instructor: Arraiza Rivera

Close readings of brief, groundbreaking fiction and essays that explore various forms of social injustice. We will study various authors from Spain, Argentina, Cuba, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico who wrote during different historical periods, from the XVII century to the present. The selected texts and films feature young protagonists and/ or narrators facing formidable obstacles while dreaming of a better society for themselves and others. Class discussions focus on the readings as well as current events from around the Spanish-speaking world.

Topics for Spring 2027:

The Marvelous in Latin American Literature and Culture; Instructor: Guzauskyte

This course explores the intersections between fantasy and reality in literary texts, art, film, cultural events, and digital content from various Spanish-speaking countries (Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, Uruguay, Colombia, Argentina, and Spain). Texts and materials to be studied range from pre-Hispanic indigenous myth and art, to works from colonial and contemporary periods. We will study how societies and individual authors have explored fantasy and imagination in their various forms including myth, fable, magic, superstition, miracle, hallucination, magic realism, and the fantastic. Course materials will include readings, works of art, film, and music. Focus on class discussions, public speaking, and student writing, both critical and creative. Ann E. Maurer '51 Speaking Intensive Course.

Art with a Cause in Modern Spain  From Goya to Rosalía; Instructor: Ramos

Artists in Spain have a long tradition of confronting violence and injustice as well as raising awareness, about pressing issues from the effect of wars on civilians to domestic abuse. This class will explore how modern Spanish artists have used their work to comment on and change minds about the thorniest matters of their time. Our analysis will range through many different forms of art, including painting, performance art, photography, graphic novels, film, and popular music.

Spanish in the United States Instructor: Lorena Alarcón

This Spanish course provides a sociolinguistic overview of Spanish in the United States by examining concepts, such as language contact, language varieties, language maintenance, bilingualism, language attitudes, linguistic landscapes, etc. This course also discusses how Spanish is used in the U.S. with a focus on the development of sociolinguistic awareness.

This course is for Heritage Learners of Spanish. Heritage Speakers have learned Spanish primarily as an immersion experience at home. Participants will improve their written and oral Spanish through the examination of cultural assumptions and values. Content is based on a variety of topics such as legends, differing historical perspectives, traditions, and others. The review of language structures and grammar will emerge from students’ language levels. Participants will read novels, short stories, plays, and essays. Students will examine multimedia illustrating experiences of Latinos/Hispanics in the United States. By the end of the semester, students will gain an understanding of how their culture influences language learning and how language learning affects their perspective of Latino/Hispanic culture. The course is conducted entirely in Spanish.

This class integrates the reading, studying and performing of some of the most important plays in Spanish Theatre. Students will learn about the Spanish theatrical tradition while developing their language and critical skills. Taught in Spanish.

The course explores the mythological, literary, artistic, and cultural landscapes of the Andes spanning the ancient civilizations (including the Nazca, Moche, and Inca) and throughout the colonial period, prior to the proclamation of Independence of the countries in the region. Emphasis on Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia, including their indigenous, Afro-Andean and immigrant communities. Authors and texts will include pre-Hispanic oral traditions in Quechua, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Guamán Poma de Ayala, Catalina de Erauso, Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón, Ricardo Palma, Clorinda Matto de Turner, as well as select postcolonial writers and theorists.

This course explores the construction of the child and adolescent voices in Argentine contemporary fiction and film. We will consider how young protagonists’ curiosities, trepidations, and transgressions in adult-regimented worlds have critical implications for class, gender, sexual and racial politics. Our discussions will center on diverse portrayals of children and adolescents as navigators of their settings, which range from shantytowns to country clubs, rural provinces to urban centers, homeless shelters to sheltered existences. Short stories, novels, and films by Lucrecia Martel, Albertina Carri, Benjamín Ávila, Paula Markovitch, Mariana Enríquez, Samanta Schweblin, Ana Llurba, Andrés Neuman, and Agustina Bazterrica, will be considered.

A study of selected works, creators and historical events that shaped Spain's multiethnic and linguistically diverse identity from the 10th to the 17th centuries. Authors and topics explored in this class include El Cantar de Mío Cid, Alfonso X el Sabio and the Spain of the "three cultures", the poetry of Hebrew and Arabic Spain, the Reconquista, and the writing of American Chronicles, as well as some examples of the work of Garcilaso de la Vega, Fray Luis de León, Santa Teresa, San Juan de la Cruz, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca.

A survey of the genre with in-depth analysis of works in Spanish by foundational writers like Rubén Darío and Horacio Quiroga, Rubén Darío, and Horacio Quiroga, as well as twentieth-century masters Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, Julio Cortázar, Elena Garro, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel García Márquez, among others. Special attention to voices that have emerged since 2000, such as Mayra  Santos-Febres (Puerto Rico), Rita Indiana Hernández (Dominican Republic), Edmundo Paz Soldán (Bolivia), Roberto Bolaño (Chile/Mexico) and Alejandra Kamiya (Argentina). We will explore themes of identity, memory, class, freedom, creative expression, myth-making, violence, mass media, race, education, women, children, and urban and rural life.

A study of the struggle for self-expression in Franco's Spain and the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Special attention will be devoted to the literature and the cinema of the Civil War and exile, and to contemporary renegotiations of the memory of the war. The materials will include recent explorations of the effects of war trauma in literature, cinema and politics. Authors include Mercè Rodoreda, Carmen Laforet, Manuel Rivas, Alberto Méndez, Adelaida García Morales, and Víctor Erice.

An introduction to the major literary, historical, artistic and cultural traditions of the Caribbean. Attention will focus on the Spanish-speaking island countries: Cuba, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. We will discuss such topics as slavery, independence, nation-building, race, gender, dictatorship, and immigration. We will use a variety of texts, films and artworks. Authors may include Juan Francisco Manzano, José Martí, Julia de Burgos, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, Nancy Morejón, Luis Palés Matos, Mayra Santos Febres and Junot Díaz.

A multidisciplinary introduction to contemporary Spain’s life and culture. Literary, historical, artistic, and anthropological readings will inform our understanding of recurrent themes in the construction and questioning of Spanish national identity and culture: regional diversity and tensions between centralism and autonomy; the legacy of the Civil War and Franco dictatorship; Spain's transition to democracy and European integration; the role of religion and tradition in modern Spanish society; contemporary social movements and cultural transformations. Attention will be paid to Portugal and to the diversity of languages and cultures of the Iberian Peninsula.

This course offers an introduction to the works of Spanish women authors ranging from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth. Topics include: the links between gender constructs and literary genres, representations of women's voices in early poetry, novels, letters and autobiography, rhetorical and artistic self-fashioning, and the analysis of women's access to writing, education, and socio-political institutions in early modern Spain. Texts by, among others, Teresa de Cartagena, Florencia Pinar, Teresa of Ávila, María de Zayas, Ana Caro, Hipólita de Narváez, Sor María de Ágreda and Sor Marcela de san Félix along artworks by Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana will be read and discussed.

In this interdisciplinary course, students will acquire a deep understanding of the colonial Latin American period, while learning to identify and interpret textiles, clothing items, and fashion movements. Focus on women’s fashion styles in the 17th and 18th centuries Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Mexico. Topics will include dress as a form of language, representation, and performance; morality, and sexuality; dress and politics. Materials will include primary and secondary sources; illustrations of clothing in printed and manuscript texts; textiles and clothing in museums, Special Collections, and digital collections; films and webcasts; and representations of clothing in various art forms and digital sources.

This course examines Mexican culture from the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) to the rise of cartels and the war on drugs. We will analyze texts by writers, artists, filmmakers, political leaders, and public intellectuals, exploring how they negotiated, redefined, and contested what it meant to be modern. Topics include the causes of the Revolution and its aftermath, the single-party authoritarian rule of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), the student movement of 1968, the 1985 earthquake, neoliberalism, and the rise of the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation), women’s voices, immigration, and border culture.

The course focuses on women’s literary expression and the roles women played in the societies of pre-Hispanic and colonial Latin America, which ranged from being enslaved and serving as concubines to being recognized as key figures of leadership and prominent literary voices. The course will integrate writing by women with the ways in which women are depicted in visual and material culture, historical sources, and film. Authors to be studied may include Anacaona, Malinche, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda.

An examination of the interweaving relationship between race and gender in the framework of nation building during Latin America's era of independence. Through literary, cultural, and historical studies, we will explore how the ideological trends that defined the fundamental characteristics of the nineteenth century continue to shape Latin American identities today.  A wide range of literary genres will be discussed (essays, novels, poems, and chronicles), as well as other cultural products, such as art, music, and film.  Topics covered include wars of independence, art and nationalism, anti-imperialism, the role of gender and sexuality in the national imagination, slavery and violence, and popular culture (e.g. folkloric music, dance, visual arts). Readings may cover texts by Simón Bolívar, Andrés Bello, Domingo F. Sarmiento, José Martí, José Enrique Rodó, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Clorinda Matto de Turner, and José de Alencar.

A close reading of the Quixote with particular emphasis on Cervantes' invention of the novel form: creation of character, comic genius, hero versus anti-hero, levels of reality and fantasy, and history versus fiction.

This course focuses on fundamental films by prominent contemporary Argentine women filmmakers. We examine these directors’ influence on the New Argentine Cinema (NAC) and explore their diverse aesthetic contributions to the country’s film industry. Interdisciplinary readings about the country’s socio-political and cultural changes from 1995 onwards guide our discussions, explorations, and analyses. Films by Albertina Carri, Lucrecia Martel, Julia Solomonoff, Paula Markovitch, María Victoria Menis, Gabriela David, and Lucía Puenzo.

A study of U.S. Hispanic writers of the Southwest and East Coast from the Spanish colonial period to the present. Political, social, racial, and intellectual contexts of their times and shared inheritance will be explored. Consideration of the literary origins and methods of their craft. Authors may include: Cabeza de Vaca, Gaspar de Villagrá, José Villarreal, Lorna Dee Cervantes, José Martí, Uva Clavijo, Pedro Juan Soto, Miguel Algarín, and Edward Rivera.

A study of the cultural notions of clothing and nakedness in colonial Latin America, and their uses in construing social and economic status, gender, race, and power during the conquest and the colonial period. The role of clothing in indigenous cultures pre- and post- conquest will also be studied throughout the semester. We will examine a broad range of representations of clothing, costume, veiling, textiles, as well as perceived nakedness, jewelry and adornments, among other expressions of the culture of clothing in both literary and historical written accounts (chronicles, letters, historias, poetry, treatises, and novels), oral traditions (such as myth and song in Nahua, Maya, Inca, and other indigenous cultures), and visual culture (codices, sculpture, religious paintings, portraiture).

Analysis of how masculinity is constructed in key Spanish canonical texts of the period. Together with the “Don Juan” and the “rogue/trickster” (“el pícaro”)—two literary archetypes bequeathed by Spain to the world, models for defining aspects of manhood will include the battling hero, the saint, the villain, the “average guy,” and the philosopher. Emphasis will be placed on how these figures interact with and defined by interaction with women and how the un-enunciated queer is ever present. Together with examining how masculinity reflects notions of honor, virility, social order, religion, and misogyny, the course will consider medical and biological models of manhood and how those framed gender.

This seminar examines Cuban literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present. As a tropical island in the Caribbean ruled by numerous imperial powers and domestic tyrants, Cuba has often been perceived as a paradise and/or a prison. We will study both the literal and metaphorical meanings of these two symbols through various modes of cultural expression, including prose, poetry, art, music, and film. We will discuss such topics as colonialism, slavery, the independence movement, the Cuban Revolution, socialism, race and gender, immigration, and the changing relationship between Cuba and the United States. Readings may include texts by Juan Franciscano Manzano, José Martí, Cristina García, Fidel Castro, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, José Lezama Lima, Reinaldo Arenas, Yoani Sanchéz, and Sonia Rivera-Valdés.

An in-depth inquiry into the writings, life, and legacy of the salient Mexican woman poet, dramatist, scholar, and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651?-1695), known for her precocious literary talent, mastery of the poetic forms of the Hispanic Baroque, thirst for knowledge, early defense of women’s learning, and dramatic life. Students will be introduced to interdisciplinary Sor Juana studies through approaches from literary criticism, women’s and gender studies, sexuality studies, and the studies of colonial and postcolonial discourses. Readings will include sonnets, romances, and villancicos written in Spanish and Nahuatl, plays, excerpts from the long poem entitled First Dream, and prose texts including Letter Worthy of Athena, Allegorical Neptune, and the autobiographical essay, The Answer. The course will also explore Sor Juana’s reception in contemporary literary criticism, essays, visual art, and film.

Medieval Spain, at the nexus of the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic cultures, witnessed a flowering of literature dealing with the nature and depiction of love. This course will examine works from all three traditions, stressing the uses of symbolic language in the linguistic representation of physical desire. Texts will include Ibn Hazm, The Dove's Neck-Ring; the poetry of Yehuda Ha-Levi and Ben Sahl of Seville; the Mozarabic kharjas; the Galician cantigas de amigo; Juan Ruiz, The Book of Good Love; Diego de San Pedro, Cárcel de Amor; and Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina.

This seminar will explore how contemporary writers, artists, and activists from Spain, Latin America and the US use various nonfiction forms to document personal experiences of love, loss, and identity, as well as important political, cultural, and social issues. We will investigate their creative uses of the personal essay, biography, memoir, autofiction, profiles, blogs, and longform journalism. In addition, we will examine visual, audio, and multimedia forms such as documentaries, podcasts, photography, and graphic novels. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which these examples of Creative Nonfiction use the tools and techniques of fiction to develop material based on real personal experiences, public events, and cultural phenomena. Students will have the opportunity to produce analytical responses to the texts and topics covered in the course, as well as their own creative pieces .

Using a gender-aware perspective and a wide variety of literary texts,, documents, films, and architectural and artistic examples, this course will explore various forms of Modernity and Modernization in Spain. The analysis will go beyond aesthetic modernity to consider social change and cultural transformation. Main figures will include Federico García Lorca, Maruja Mallo, Vicente Huidobro, Antonio Gaudí, Luis Buñuel, Concha Méndez and “las sinsombrero”, José Ortega y Gasset, Clara Campoamor, Victoria Kent, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso. The connections between modernity and postmodernity will also be explored, as well as a comparison of the attitudes towards change and innovation at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries.

An in-depth study of food in Latin American literature and culture, with a particular focus on its functions and symbolism in indigenous cultures and in the context of the transatlantic exchanges of food products, plants, animals, and recipes among the Americas, Europe, and Africa after 1492. We will also study the role of food and cuisine in the search for new literary forms of expression during the Latin American independence era and contemporary times. The course will study depictions of food, cooking, recipe books, private and public spaces, hunger, deprivation, and body image to explore power relations, gender, race, sexuality, and identity as rooted in long-standing, multicultural traditions involving preparation and consumption of food, global exchanges of foodstuffs, plant, and animal species, as well as the emergence of new hybrid cultures. Readings may include Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo's Historia, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz' Respuesta, Francisco de Paula García Peláez' Libro del Chocolate, Fernando Ortiz' Contrapunteo cubano, and Laura Esquivel's Como agua para chocolate.

An examination of twentieth-century women writers from Latin America. Perspectives for analyses will include questions of identity (national, ethnic/racial, religious, sexual, gender), the extent to which Afro-Hispanic, Indigenous, and non-Christian writers constitute distinct, marginalized groups in Latin American literature, and a comparison of issues regarding identity in selected canonical and noncanonical works by Gabriela Mistral, Remedios Varo, Elena Poniatowska, Nancy Morejón, Rosario Aguilar, Gioconda Belli, and Victoria Ocampo.

Connections between two geographically remote areas (Asia and Latin America) that would seem to have little in common will be studied. By analyzing prose, poetry, art, and music, we will examine diverse Asian influences in Latin American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present. We will explore how various images of the “exotic” Orient are represented in Latin America during the periods of “modernismo” and “vanguardia.” We will also examine contemporary Asian-Latin American writers and artists with an emphasis on the multicultural experience of immigration and assimilation. Authors may include Edward Said, José Martí, José Rizal, Rubén Darío, José Juan Tablada, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, Cristina García, Anna Kazumi Stahl, José Watanabe, Siu Kam Wen, and Seiichi Higashide.