Spanish (SPAN)

SPAN 1120 - Elementary Spanish: Review and Continuation (4 Credits)  
While building language proficiency and accuracy through communicative activities, the course encourages students to actively interact with one another. The instructor facilitates communication and provides feedback and language learning strategies that guide students to take responsibility for their own learning and become active participants in the process. The course also introduces students to the many peoples and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world, prompting them to make comparisons with their own culture. Additionally, lectures provide students with opportunities to reflect on relevant grammar topics and assist students in developing language learning strategies.
Prerequisites: LPS 37-44.  
Forbidden Overlaps: SPAN 1120, SPAN 1220  
Distribution Requirements: (FL-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, EULANG, LALANG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
SPAN 1210 - Elementary Spanish I (4 Credits)  
While building language proficiency and accuracy through communicative activities, the course encourages students to actively interact with one another. The instructor facilitates communication and provides feedback and language learning strategies that guide students to take responsibility of their own learning and become active participants in the process. The course also introduces students to the many peoples and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world, prompting them to make comparisons with their own culture. Additionally, lectures provide students with opportunities to reflect on relevant grammar topics and assist students in developing language learning strategies. Class discussions are conducted entirely in Spanish. After 1210 students may take SPAN 1120 (fall) or SPAN 1220 (spring).
Prerequisites: students with no previous knowledge of Spanish, up to two years of high school Spanish, LPS score lower than 37.  
Distribution Requirements: (FL-AG), (OCL-IL)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, EULANG, LALANG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
SPAN 1220 - Elementary Spanish II (4 Credits)  
While building language proficiency and accuracy through communicative activities, the course encourages students to actively interact with one another. The instructor facilitates communication and provides feedback and language learning strategies that guide students to take responsibility of their own learning and become active participants in the process. The course also introduces students to the many peoples and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world, prompting them to make comparisons with their own culture. Additionally, lectures provide students with opportunities to reflect on relevant grammar topics and assist students in developing language learning strategies. Class discussions are conducted entirely in Spanish. After 1220, students may take SPAN 1230, SPAN 2070, or SPAN 2090 depending on their LPS score.
Prerequisites: SPAN 1210, or LPS 37-44.  
Forbidden Overlaps: SPAN 1120, SPAN 1220  
Distribution Requirements: (FL-AG), (OCL-IL)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, EULANG, LALANG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
SPAN 1230 - Continuing Spanish (4 Credits)  
SPAN 1230 is the third course in the Spanish language sequence. It is designed to help students progress from the novice high level to the intermediate mid level in speaking, listening, reading and writing. The course is structured around four thematic units: fashion and art; the natural world; personal relationships; and health. In each unit, we will learn the vocabulary and grammar constructions that are necessary to talk about the unit's topic. Particular emphasis will be placed on the skill of giving and defending opinions. Throughout the semester, we will discuss and analyze a wide variety of art from the Hispanic world, including songs, fashion, visual arts, TV shows, films, performance art, newspaper articles, documentaries, film shorts and podcasts. The overall goal of this course is to develop students' ability to comprehend authentic materials in Spanish and formulate nuanced opinions about those materials.
Prerequisites: SPAN 1120, SPAN 1220, or LPS 45-55.  
Distribution Requirements: (FL-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, EULANG, LAAREA, LALANG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Summer 2024  
SPAN 1250 - Spanish for Heritage Speakers I (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with LSP 1250  
This low-intermediate course expands Heritage students' confidence and competence in Spanish by providing opportunities to build upon the conversational skills they have. Through literary texts, other readings, music, films and the visual arts students broaden their vocabulary, improve grammatical accuracy, develop writing skills and enrich their understanding of the cultures of the Spanish-speaking world. The heritage student grew up speaking Spanish and finished high school in the U.S.
Prerequisites: SPAN 1120, SPAN 1220, or LPS 45-55.  
Distribution Requirements: (FL-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
SPAN 1305 - FWS:Narrating the Spanish Civil War (3 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2020  
SPAN 1501 - Strategies for Spanish Abroad (1 Credit)  
This innovative topics course focuses on oral communication in Spanish for students concurrently enrolled in courses offering special projects abroad or short term study abroad trips. Emphasis is placed on developing speaking and listening skills and strategies in a culturally relevant context. It is intended for students with limited or no knowledge of Spanish and active class participation is required.
Corequisites: varies depending on enrollment.  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2022, Spring 2022, Spring 2021  
SPAN 1502 - Conversational Skills for Spanish in Global Contexts (1 Credit)  
This innovative course focuses on basic oral communication in Spanish. Emphasis is placed on developing speaking and listening skills and strategies in a culturally relevant context. It is intended for students with limited or no knowledge of Spanish and active class participation is required.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023  
SPAN 2000 - Spanish for Heritage Speakers (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with LSP 2020  
Designed to expand bilingual Heritage students' knowledge of Spanish by providing them with ample opportunities to develop and improve each of the basic language skills, with a particular focus on writing vocabulary. The heritage student has at least one parent of Hispanic origin and grew up speaking Spanish at home; s/he also finished high school here in the US. After this course, students may take SPAN 2095.
Prerequisites: LSP 56 or higher, CASE placement.  
Distribution Requirements: (FL-AG), (FLOPI-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, EULANG, LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023  
SPAN 2070 - Intermediate Spanish for the Medical and Health Professions (3 Credits)  
Provides a conversational grammar review, with dialogues, debates, compositions, and authentic readings on health-related themes. Special attention is given to relevant cultural differences and how cultural notions may affect medical care and communication between doctor and patient. The objective of 2070 is to provide practice in real-life application, such as taking a medical history, calming a patient, and how to speak to a Hispanic patient in a culturally acceptable manner. After this course, a student may take or SPAN 2095.
Prerequisites: SPAN 1230, LPS 56-64, Q on CASE exam.  
Distribution Requirements: (FL-AG), (FLOPI-AS), (OCL-IL)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, LALANG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023  
SPAN 2090 - Intermediate Spanish I (Composition and Conversation) (3 Credits)  
This intermediate course develops accurate and idiomatic oral and written expression in a cultural context. Students achieve a higher level of syntactical and lexical competence through reading and discussing literary texts and viewing films. Particular emphasis is on writing and editing academic essays with peer/instructor feedback. Classes are in Spanish and the language is actively used in oral presentations and communicative, creative, and critical-thinking activities. Students review grammar structures on their own, with clarification and support of the instructor. After this course, students may take SPAN 2095.
Prerequisites: SPAN 1230, or LPS 56-64, or CASE Q.  
Distribution Requirements: (FL-AG), (FLOPI-AS), (OCL-IL)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, EULANG, LALANG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Summer 2024  
SPAN 2095 - Spanish Intermediate Composition and Conversation II (3 Credits)  
This advanced-intermediate course is designed to prepare students for study abroad and is required for any Cornell CASA program in a Spanish speaking country. It also serves as an entryway into the major, and advanced-level courses. Students study stylistics, analyze and discuss texts, view films, and acquire advanced reading strategies. Continued emphasis is on writing and editing academic essays with peer and instructor feedback. Classes are in Spanish, and the language is actively used in oral presentations and communicative, creative, and critical-thinking activities. Students review grammar structures on their own, although the instructor may clarify as needed.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2070, SPAN 2090, or CASE Q+.  
Distribution Requirements: (FL-AG), (FLOPI-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Summer 2024  
SPAN 2130 - Advanced Spoken Spanish (3 Credits)  
This advanced course will focus on spoken Spanish in its formal and informal registers, regional dialects, and pronunciations. Authentic texts from across different genres of film, newspapers, fiction, songs, and essays will be used to develop all skills with emphasis on oral production, as well as intercultural and pragmatic competence. Students will further their fluency and accuracy by engaging in activities that might include debates, oral presentations, and interviews.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2095 or CASE Q++.  
Distribution Requirements: (FL-AG), (FLOPI-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
SPAN 2140 - Modern Spanish Survey (3 Credits)  
Introductory survey of modern Spanish literature. Students develop their analytical skills and learn basic literary concepts such as genre (drama, lyric, short story, and novel) and style (romanticism, realism, etc.) as well as male/female perspectives and the translation of literature to film language. The survey introduces students to Spain's cultural complexity through readings of works by authors representative of its diverse linguistic and literary traditions.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2095 , or CASE Q++.  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, FLOPI-AS, GLC-AS), (FL-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, EULANG, LAAREA, LALANG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023  
SPAN 2150 - Contemporary Latin American Survey (3 Credits)  
Readings and discussion of representative texts of the 19th and 20th centuries from various regions of Latin America. Among the authors considered are Sarmiento, Hernandez, Marti, Dario, Agustini, Cortazar, Garcia Marquez, Poniatowska, and Valenzuela.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2095, or CASE Q++.  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, FLOPI-AS), (FL-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, LAAREA, LALANG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023  
SPAN 2170 - Early Modern Iberian Survey (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with LATA 2170, MEDVL 2170  
This course explores major texts and themes of the Hispanic tradition from the 11th to the 17th centuries. We will examine general questions on literary analysis and the relationship between literature and history around certain events, such as medieval multicultural Iberia, the creation of the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century and the expulsion of the Jews in 1492; the encounter between the Old and the New Worlds; the 'opposition' of high and low in popular culture, and of the secular and the sacred in poetry and prose. Readings may be drawn from medieval short stories and miracle collections; chivalric romances, Columbus, Lazarillo de Tormes, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calder?and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, among others.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2095, or CASE Q++.  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, FLOPI-AS, HST-AS), (FL-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, LAAREA, LALANG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023  
SPAN 2180 - Advanced Spanish Writing Workshop (3 Credits)  
This course, which is required for the major, is designed to help the learner develop increased accuracy and sophistication in writing in Spanish for academic purposes and continued oral practice in Spanish. To this end, there will be ample writing and revising practice, with a focus on specific grammatical and lexical areas, customized to the needs of the students enrolled in the course. All writing will be based on a particular theme relating to Latin America with a focus on film, literary texts, newspaper readings and conducting an interview.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2095 or CASE Q++ or permission of instructor required.  
Distribution Requirements: (FL-AG), (FLOPI-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, LAAREA, LALANG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Summer 2024  
SPAN 2200 - Perspectives on Latin America (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with LATA 2200  
Interdisciplinary course offered every spring. Topics vary by semester, but readings always focus on current research in various disciplines and regions of Latin America. The range of issues addressed include the economic, social, cultural, and political trends and transitions in the area. In the weekly meetings, instructors and guest lecturers facilitate student discussions. Students taking the course are required to participate in all class discussions and write a research paper in their chosen focus area.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG, FL-AG), (GLC-AS, SCD-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
SPAN 2205 - Perspectives on Latin America in Spanish (3 Credits)  
Interdisciplinary course offered every spring. Topics vary by semester, but readings always focus on current research in various disciplines and regions of Latin America. The range of issues addressed include the economic, social, cultural, and political trends and transitions in the area. In the weekly meetings, instructors and guest lecturers facilitate student discussions. Students taking the course are required to participate in all class discussions and write a research paper in their chosen focus area.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2095 or CASE Q++ or permission of instructor required.  
Distribution Requirements: (FL-AG), (FLOPI-AS, GLC-AS, SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
SPAN 2230 - Perspectives on Spain (3 Credits)  
This course offers a broad introduction to modern and contemporary Spanish culture of the late 19 - early 21 centuries. Throughout the semester we will examine key works from various cultural genres, with particular emphasis on the visual arts, including film, painting, photography, poetry, documentary, newsreels, theater, and architecture, with the main objective being to explore diverse perspectives that are all unique to the ever-evolving place we call Spain. Additional topics of study include: empire and nation-state formation, Generaci?98, intellectual literary and artistic movements, architectural movements and styles, dictatorship and democracy, folklore and tradition, Catholicism, fascism, revolutionary aesthetics, the politics of censorship, modernization, la Apertura, counter-cultural movements (such as the NCE-nuevo cine espa?and La movida), gender and identity, Francoism, nationalisms and regionalisms, and the politics of Historical Memory.
Forbidden Overlaps: SPAN 2230, SPAN 2235  
Distribution Requirements: (FL-AG), (GLC-AS, SCD-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, LAAREA, LALANG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Fall 2024, Summer 2024, Fall 2023  
SPAN 2235 - Perspectives on Spain in Spanish (3 Credits)  
This course offers a broad introduction to modern and contemporary Spanish culture of the late 19 - early 21 centuries. Throughout the semester we will examine key works from various cultural genres, with particular emphasis on the visual arts, including film, painting, photography, poetry, documentary, newsreels, theater, and architecture, with the main objective being to explore diverse perspectives that are all unique to the ever-evolving place we call Spain. Additional topics of study include: empire and nation-state formation, Generaci?98, intellectual literary and artistic movements, architectural movements and styles, dictatorship and democracy, folklore and tradition, Catholicism, fascism, revolutionary aesthetics, the politics of censorship, modernization, la Apertura, counter-cultural movements (such as the NCE-nuevo cine espa?and La movida), gender and identity, Francoism, nationalisms and regionalisms, and the politics of Historical Memory.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2095 or CASE Q++ or permission of instructor required.  
Forbidden Overlaps: SPAN 2230, SPAN 2235  
Distribution Requirements: (FL-AG), (FLOPI-AS, GLC-AS, SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
SPAN 2460 - Contemporary Narratives by Latina Writers (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with LSP 2460, FGSS 2460, COML 2032, AMST 2460  
This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important fictional work by US Latina writers, including short stories, novel, and film, with a particular focus on social justice, gender advocacy work, and work by Afro Latinx writers. We will begin with discussion of canonical figures like Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, to provide a basis for our focus on more recent writers like Angie Cruz, Elizabeth Acevedo, Linda Yvette Chavez, and Carmen Maria Machado.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2021  
SPAN 2715 - A Global South: Chile, the Pacific and the World (4-5 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 2715, LATA 2715  
This course examines the history of Chile from the 1700s to the present, always with an appreciation for its place in a broader world but always also with attention to its regional and national specificities and its links to the Pacific. Lectures will be paired with readings from various genres: fiction, poetry, journalism, manifestos, speeches, historical monographs, and short stories.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, HA-AG), (GLC-AS, HST-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-CEL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2020  
SPAN 3020 - Spanish Language Across the Curriculum (LAC) (1 Credit)  
This 1-credit optional course aims to expand the students' vocabulary, and advance their speaking and reading skills as well as enhance their knowledge and deepen their cultural understanding by supplementing non-language courses throughout the University.
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023  
SPAN 3170 - Creative Writing Workshop (in Spanish) (3 Credits)  
Focuses on the practice of narrative writing in Spanish. Explores what makes a novel and a short story work, paying close attention to narrative structure, plot, beginnings/endings, character development, theme, etc. Students read classic novels and short stories as points of departure for the discussion. Because the course is a workshop, students are expected to write their own fiction.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2095, SPAN 2140, SPAN 2150, SPAN 2170, or CASE Q++.  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, FLOPI-AS), (FL-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, LALANG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2021  
SPAN 3290 - Performance and Memory in Contemporary Latin America (3 Credits)  
How does the body remember the past? In this course, we will take this question as a point of departure to analyze the work of twelve contemporary artists from Latin America whose performances revisit individual, collective, national and global pasts in order to challenge official histories, denounce unspoken violences, and create space of empowerment and healing. As we discuss these performances in dialogue with the work of various critics and theorists, we will consider the potentialities and the limitations of performance, the ethics of reenactment and representation, and the sort of memories and archives we can only access through the body.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2095, CASE Q++, or permission of the instructor  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, FLOPI-AS)  
SPAN 3335 - Border Environments (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COML 3336, LSP 3336, LATA 3336  
This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021  
SPAN 3465 - Performing the Comedia: Text, Voice, Body (3 Credits)  
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mark the Golden Age of Spanish theater, celebrated for its wealth of plays or comedias, the social prominence of the stage at the time, and the lasting relevance of its themes in present day. This course examines Spanish Golden Age theatre through performance, exploring how comedias were staged historically and how they can be revived today through acting, editing, and translation. Performance, understood as embodied practice and restored experience, offers insight into how comedias shaped identities, mediated interactions, and reflected realities. Students will develop their oral and written communication in Spanish while engaging critically with key sociopolitical issues. They will also increase their familiarity with dramatic text analysis, stage performance, literary translation, and bibliographical research.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2180 or permission of instructor.  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, FLOPI-AS)  
SPAN 3485 - Cinematic Cities (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with FREN 3485, ITAL 3485, COML 3485, PMA 3485  
Beginning in the early days of silent cinema, a rich tradition of what are called city films, combines technological innovation with the exploration of specific urban spaces. Students in this class will learn how to think about the possibilities of limits of cinema as a way of knowing a city and its cultures, including linguistic cultures. This course will be offered in English and is open to all students. The focus will be on the relationship between the cinema and the development of urban centers, including Madrid, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2019, Summer 2019, Spring 2018  
SPAN 3570 - Spanish Photography (3 Credits)  
From portraiture to landscape, from the urban to rural, from the monumental to the mundane, this course explores Spanish photography, studying a range of artists and styles - formal, experimental, documentary, abstract, conceptual - between 19th century and the present. At the heart of weekly discussions will be some key foundational questions: What is photography? What is Spanish photography? How does one read a photograph? What does photography, a supposedly visual medium, have to do with language, textuality and writing? What are different theories of photography? This course is conducted in Spanish and designed for a diverse group of students, including those who already are familiar with the language of photography as well as those who have never studied photography before.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2180.  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, FLOPI-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025  
SPAN 3620 - Fashion Victims (3 Credits)  
This course examines the politics of fashion in Spain from the 18th-21st centuries, exploring such topics as textile trade and Spanish empire, ethnicity and national garb, fashion and gender norms, as well as contemporary debates around cultural appropriation.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2140, SPAN 2150, SPAN 2170, or CASE Q++.  
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG), (FLOPI-AS, SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024  
SPAN 3675 - Diasporas, Disasters, and Dissent: Re-Thinking Puerto Rican Studies in the 20th and 21st Centuries (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENGL 3678, LSP 3678, AMST 3679  
Foreign in a domestic sense is the perplexing way that the Supreme Court of the United States chose to define Puerto Rico's status in the so-called Insular Cases of the early 20th century. Written over 100 years ago, this contradictory ruling looms large over Puerto Rico's precarious legal standing, despite the fact that there are now more Puerto Ricans living on the US mainland than in the island itself. Seeking to counter the obfuscation of Puerto Rico in the US imaginary, in this course students will analyze how key historical, political, and social moments connected to diasporas, disasters, and dissent have galvanized Puerto Rican cultural production in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG), (GLC-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024  
SPAN 3710 - Latin American Documentary (3 Credits)  
Documentaries are born out of the necessity to capture the real and to tell a truth. When we watch documentaries, we tend to comfortably rely on that claim and, often, take what they teach us as indisputable evidence of what reality is. In this course, we will put into questions the reality that documentaries portray-and the possibility itself of portraying reality-by discussing a selection of Latin American documentaries that raise important issues regarding the ethics and politics of representation. In our discussions, we will critically engage with the boundaries of the cinematic frame and debate the ethical responsibilities of the filmmaker, the value and the political and social impact of the image, the role of the spectator, and the implications of filming and being filmed by an other.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2140, SPAN 2150, SPAN 2170, SPAN 2180, or CASE Q++, or permission of instructor.  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, ETM-AS, FLOPI-AS), (KCM-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023  
SPAN 3760 - Thought, Praxis and Way of Life in South America's Andean Region (3 Credits)  
This course aims at introducing students to the core elements of the thought, praxis and way of life of one of the key bastions of indigenous resistance in the New World since Columbus's arrival in 1492: South America's Andean region. We will study the region's key cultural categories, following Cuzque?poet and thinker Odi Gonzales's claim that any study of the region requires taking these categories as starting point. These include questions of time, space, life, death, society, religion, number, and gender. We will study how these categories are formed in tension, syncretism and co-transformation with other languages and cultures-especially Spanish-over centuries of colonial and neocolonial domination. Primary material examined include films, photography, drama, novels, poetry, testimonies, and religious texts.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2095.  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, FLOPI-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024  
SPAN 3800 - Poetry and Poetics of the Americas (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COML 3800, AMST 3820, LATA 3800, ENGL 3910  
As globalization draws the Americas ever closer together, reshaping our sense of a common and uncommon American culture, what claims might be made for a distinctive, diverse poetry and poetics of the Americas? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what convergences and differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Pound, Stein, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Bola?Cesaire, Nourbese Philip, Hong, Long Soldier, Rankine, Lamar, Kaminsky, and Xie.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (AFAREA, LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2021  
SPAN 4060 - Medieval Literary Economics (3 Credits)  
This course explores how the vocabulary (words like price and credit), structure (such as one of loss and gain), and ropes of medieval (and early modern) Spanish fiction speak to the emergence of different economic figures, reading texts from the 13th through the 17th centuries may include Poema de mio Cid, ibro de Apolonio, Yida de santa Maria Ogipciaca, Libro del conde Lucanon, poetry by Quevedo and Gongora, etc. and critical texts by Mauss, Derrida, Shell, Bataille, and others.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, FLOPI-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2016  
SPAN 4111 - Speculative and Other Futures (3 Credits)  
In this course, we will analyze the various ways in which the future has been imagined from Latin America, exploring both utopian and dystopian scenarios. Through novels, short stories, films, documentaries, music, and non-fiction works, we will examine topics such as the future of care work, cyborgs and other posthuman bodies, indigenous technologies, environmental destruction, and alternative societies. We will explore how Latin American feminism, Afrofuturism, music, and social movements construct possible futures to reflect on and challenge colonialism, racism, gender-based and anti-LGBTQ violence, and inequality.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS)  
SPAN 4190 - Special Topics in Spanish Literature (2-4 Credits)  
Guided independent study of special topics. For undergraduates interested in special problems not covered in courses.
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
SPAN 4200 - Special Topics in Spanish Literature (2-4 Credits)  
Guided independent study of special topics. For undergraduates interested in special problems not covered in courses.
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
SPAN 4290 - Honors Work I (4 Credits)  
Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.
Enrollment Information: Open to: juniors and seniors.  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-UG); (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
SPAN 4300 - Honors Work II (4 Credits)  
Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.
Prerequisites: SPAN 4290.  
Enrollment Information: Open to: juniors and seniors.  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
SPAN 4380 - The Medieval Senses (3 Credits)  
The course will explore medieval culture through the five senses, emphasizing how the differences with our own knowledge and practice of the sensorium produce sets of questions and avenues for thought, attuning ourselves both to our sensorial environment and to the premodern imagination. Moving between theoretical texts-philosophy, cognition, theology, perception-and case studies-literature, but also architecture, music, stained glass, manuscripts, etc. - we will examine the conceptualization and interpretation of the sensorium and experiment with ways of reconstructing or refreshioning the medieval in the modern.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2095, CASE Q++, or permission of instructor.  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, FLOPI-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024  
SPAN 4465 - Spectacles, Monuments, Ruins (3 Credits)  
This seminar will explore Spain's political and cultural landscape through the language of modern and contemporary visual constructions, with a specific focus on three distinct yet interrelated visual spheres: spectacles, monuments, and ruins.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2140, 2150, 2170, 2180 or permission of instructor.  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, FLOPI-AS)  
SPAN 4520 - Experimental Screens: Mirrors, Memory, Media (4 Credits)  
Experimental media surfacing from different corners of the Iberian Peninsula, since the emergence of the avant-garde to the Internet age, has a long-standing history of exploring new modes of sensory perception-the relationship between technology and emotion, vision and time, abstract forms and concrete effects. In this course, we will study a range of audiovisual materials from photomontage and short animation, to surrealist cinema and video art. As we move through different registers, the goal will be to study the language of media, its aesthetic relation to literary forms, and its connection to poetry and philosophy.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, ETM-AS, FLOPI-AS), (CA-AG, KCM-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2020  
SPAN 4540 - Moses Maimonides (3 Credits)  
Moses Maimonides who was born in Cordoba (1138), moved to Fez as a youth and died in Cairo (1204) is regarded by Jewish, Islamic, and Christian tradition alike as the most important Jewish religious intellectual of the classical age of Islam/the High Middle Ages. This seminar will examine Maimonides as the product of his time and place including his complex relationship with Arabo-Islamic culture and, because of his stature as a communal figure, rabbinic scholar, court physician and philosopher, his role as a catalyst for cultural developments. For comparative purposes we also consider Maimonides' Andalusi contemporary, Ibn Rushd, the philosopher, Muslim jurist, physician and scholar of Islamic law.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, HA-AG), (GLC-AS, HST-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-ITL); (EUAREA, LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2020, Spring 2016  
SPAN 4570 - Methods in Medieval (3 Credits)  
Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students-really, all humanists?okay, all writers-find to be the greatest struggle: Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite. Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2015, Spring 2014  
SPAN 4577 - Desbordando: Reading Caribbean Waters in Latinx Studies (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENGL 4577, LSP 4577, AMST 4577  
As Latinx studies continues to expand beyond its nationalistic origins and re-examines its geographical bounds, nuancing the role of borders within the field becomes urgent. This course probes at the primacy of the border in Latinx studies by centering Caribbean waters. As a liquid that refuses to succumb to the violence of fragmentation and instead embodies iterations of radical wholeness, water has an innate capacity to undo borders, a quality epitomized by the Spanish verb desbordar (to overflow). Through discussion and analysis of key Latinx cultural products we will gain an appreciation for the multiple ways in which water sustains provocative contradictions across borders regarding representations of historical memory, gender and sexuality, migration, race, and religion and spirituality, among others.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG), (GLC-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025  
SPAN 4666 - Specters of Latin America (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 4666, LATA 4666  
In this course, we will take an inter-and multidisciplinary approach that examines works of fiction, film, performance, and photography to explore how specters intervene in and mold the social, political, and cultural landscape of contemporary Latin America. We will discuss how different spectral figures challenge official narratives of memory, ground political authority, complicate transitions and endings, and fuel social movements and revolutions. As we engage with overlapping times, uncanny spaces, and restless bodies, we will also consider how spectrality shapes is shaped by the development of new media, the contemporary resurgence of populist discourse, the global migration crisis, and the urgency of ecological concerns.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2022  
SPAN 4690 - Latin American and Latinx Environmentalisms (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with LATA 4690, LSP 4690  
This course provides an introductory overview to environmental thought in Latin America and the Latinx diaspora. We will discuss pre-Columbian approaches to the nonhuman and colonialism's transformative impact on ecosystems in the hemispheric America's. We will then turn to contemporary debates about whether nature should be treated as a resource or as a commons, with special attention paid to Indigenous philosophers like Ailton Krenak, Latinx scholars like Laura Pulido, and visual artists like Laura Aguilar and Carolina Caycdo.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025  
SPAN 4765 - Latin American Food Studies (3 Credits)  
This course explores the relationship between food and culture in Latin America. It asks what we eat and why, and in what contexts. We will examine how colonialism and globalization have shifted consumption patterns in Latin America, as well as the environmental implications of different agricultural practices. Students will whet their appetites with a variety of literary texts, films, and images about food.
Prerequisites: SPAN 2180.  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, FLOPI-AS), (CA-AG, FL-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024  
SPAN 4775 - Tales of the Amazon (3 Credits)  
This course examines the many ways the Amazon-the world;s most biodiverse region,spanning nine countries-has been imagined and represented, from a "green hell" that consumes explorers to a realm of enchanted beings like the giant snake Cobra Grande and the pink river dolphin, and from the mythical El Dorado to industrial utopias and environmental dystopias. We will explore how extractive activities and deforestation have shaped the region, while also highlighting its role as a cradle of indigenous epistemologies, technologies, and medicines, and as a space of encounter between humans and countless other forms of life. Materials include novels, films, photography, documentaries, songs visual art, and travelogues, and will be available in Spanish and Portuguese. The class is conducted in Spanish.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, FLOPI-AS)  
SPAN 4860 - Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COML 4860, ENGL 4960, AMST 4880  
What gives contemporary poetry and poetics its resonance and value? What are its dominant features, audiences, and purposes? What does 21st-century poetry's textual environment look like, and how does it situate itself among other genres, discourses, disciplines, media? How would we describe its ambient noise and how does that noise shape, inform, inflect its particular concerns and motivated forms? How does contemporary poetry resist, engage, respond to, sound out that noise? How are we to understand its relation to the pivotal cultural, economic, historical, philosophical, political developments of our time? This seminar will explore these and related questions in a wide range of works that open onto the rich interplay of contemporary poetry and poetics with questions of personal and collective identity and language in contexts at once local and global. Poets include Armantrout, Bernstein, Collins, Espada, Gander, Fitterman, Goldsmith, Hong, Osman, Place, Rich, Smith, and Waldrop.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Spring 2018, Fall 2015, Spring 2014  
SPAN 4880 - Clarice Lispector: Philosophy, Politics and Literature (3 Credits)  
What is literary creation? How does it relate to thinking, to doing, to being, to nothingness, to the cosmos? What is its temporality, identity, spatiality/place? What is literature's violence? Moreover, how do these questions relate to our sociopolitical realities,including questions of gender, class and race? These are just a few problems that one of the greatest women writers (and thinkers) of the twentieth century, the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, invites us to pose anew. In this course, we will dive deeply into her works, embracing the challenge of bridging the philosophical and the political through the literary, and doing so from the sociocultural complexities of twentieth-century Brazil. Alongside reading her works, we will watch film adaptations and trace cultural, literary and philosophical resonances.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024  
SPAN 4895 - Cyborgs, Animals, and Monsters (3 Credits)  
In this course we will explore how Latin American science fiction and fantastic novels, graphic novels, short stories, and films from the modern and contemporary period have represented the figures of the animal, the monster, and the cyborg. The aim is to reflect on what these representations tell us about the shifting notions of race, gender, and ethnicity in the region, and to analyze how these weird bodies are able to challenge binary constructions such as civilization/barbarism, nature/culture, human/animal, normal/abnormal, and body/mind, while creating spaces for emerging alternative communities. Some of the authors to be read are Mario Bellatin, Samanta Schweblin, Leonora Carrington, and Martin Felipe Castagnet.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG), (FLOPI-AS, SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2020, Spring 2018  
SPAN 4910 - Latin American Literature: Mass Media (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with LATA 4910  
This course examines Latin American literature in the context of the visual and auditory of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, in which mass media such as photography, film, and the Internet have threatened writing's representational privilege as a technology of information processing and storage. We will analyze how literature has been able to sustain its visibilty in the competitive media ecology: the power of mass media fantasies to mold the individual's subjectivity, and of the visual image to manipulate reality; the relationship between literature and popular culture and the market place: and the young writers' engagement with the new technologies of the information age.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, FLOPI-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2021, Fall 2017, Spring 2011  
SPAN 6010 - Academic Writing Workshop (3 Credits)  
This course is designed to help doctoral students (in the third year and beyond) fine-tune their academic writing in English. Over the course of the semester, we will cultivate effective and sustainable writing practices while also develping a toolkit to support writing across academic genres, including the prospectus, abstract, article and dissertation chapter. Unlike a traditional seminar, this workshop will entail weekly writing, revising, critique, and peer-review.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023  
SPAN 6060 - Medieval Literary Economics (3 Credits)  
This course explores how the vocabulary (words like price and credit), structure (such as one of loss and gain), and tropes of medieval (and early modern) Spanish fiction speak to the emergence of different economic figures, reading texts from the 13th through the 17th centuries, and critical texts by Mauss, Derrida, Shell, Bataille, and others.
Prerequisites: good reading knowledge of Spanish.  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2019, Fall 2016  
SPAN 6111 - Speculative and Other Futures (3 Credits)  
In this course, we will analyze the various ways in which the future has been imagined from Latin America, exploring both utopian and dystopian scenarios. Through novels, short stories, films, documentaries, music, and non-fiction works, we will examine topics such as the future of care work, cyborgs and other posthuman bodies, indigenous technologies, environmental destruction, and alternative societies. We will explore how Latin American feminism, Afrofuturism, music, and social movements construct possible futures to reflect on and challenge colonialism, racism, gender-based and anti-LGBTQ violence, and inequality.
SPAN 6180 - Affect-Afecto (3 Credits)  
The publication of 2010 of The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, officially marked the consolidation of the Affect Theory Turn, a turn triggered by the debates and discussions around a vast interdisciplinary corpus that challenged a view of the subject as individual and self-contained, as if focused on the intensities that pass between bodies and the bindings and unbindings, becomings and un-becomings, jarring disorientations and rhythmic attunements they provoked. The Affect Reader 2, published in 2023 and edited by Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell, raised new questions that considered both the potentialities and limitations of affect theory and how it has changed in the last decade. This course takes these debates and questions and puts them in conversation with theoretical, literary, and artistic works that, grounded in Latin America, both challenge and expand our understanding of affect by introducing the cultural, linguistic, political, and social nuances of afecto.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024  
SPAN 6190 - The UnCanny (3 Credits)  
In the field of aesthetics, the uncanny refers to an affective state, most commonly the sensation of encountering something-an object, a place, a situation-as both familiar and strange at the same time. Such experience of the strange-familiar (unheimlich) produces a disquieting sense of uncertainty, uneasiness, or doubt and may even spark extreme feelings of alienation, anxiety, dread, horror, and repulsion. This seminar explores the philosophical origins and conceptual terrain of the uncanny in relation to 20th and 21st century artistic, literary, architectural and cinematic production. If the uncanny traditionally signals a blurring of categories (familiar/unfamiliar, truth/fiction, reality/imagination) resulting in a fundamental distrust of observed reality, then what might its contemporary iterations reveal about our age of pervasive suspicion?
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023  
SPAN 6224 - Beauty, Grief (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ROMS 6224, COML 6424, FREN 6424, ITAL 6224  
This course is for anyone drawn to beauty-and anyone who, within the beautiful, finds the trace of a loss. What do we grieve, what do we miss, when we find ourselves in the presence of beauty? And what, in every retrospective, prospective or otherwise non-present beauty, do we nonetheless crave and nonetheless mourn? What is the beauty hidden within mourning? We'll take a look at thinkers, poets, and artists from both modern and premodern culture, potentially including Anne Carson, Augustine of Hippo, Fra Angelico, Gillian Rose, Herve Guibert, Pepe Espaliu, and others, as we try to sit with dual summons of beauty and grief: beauty or grief.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024  
SPAN 6335 - Border Environments (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COML 6336, LSP 6336, LATA 6336  
This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021  
SPAN 6390 - Special Topics in Spanish Literature (2-4 Credits)  
Guided independent study of specific topics. For graduate students interested in special problems not covered in courses.
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
SPAN 6400 - Special Topics in Spanish Literature (2-4 Credits)  
Guided independent study for graduate students. For graduates interested in special problems not covered in courses.
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
SPAN 6485 - 20th-21st Century Brazilian Literature (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with PORT 6485  
In this course, we will discuss innovative Brazilian narrative, poetry, and essays from the 20th century to the present. Some of the topics, literary movements, and debates to be addressed will include modernism, the representation of the Northeast region, Amazonian cosmogonies, speculative fiction, environmental issues, literary responses to dictatorship, issues of race, social inequality, and gender, and the relationship between the center and the periphery. Some authors to be discussed are Raul Bopp, Patricia Galv? Rubem Fonseca, Jo?Guimar? Rosa, Clarice Lispector, and Ana Paula Maia.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024  
SPAN 6590 - Methods in Medieval (3 Credits)  
Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students-really, all humanists?okay, all writers-find to be the greatest struggle: Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite. Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2015  
SPAN 6660 - The Question of Science in Latin American Literature (3 Credits)  
The role of science in modern Latin America has been a complex one: it has been used as a tool to justify racial oppression and legitimize colonialist projects; scientific discourse has also been used to make more complex human beings' relationship with their society and the universe. In this course, we will explore the relationship between literature and science from the early twentieth-century until the present, using as a point of departure social Darwinist discourses that purported to explain through organicist metaphors the supposed failure of the modern project in Latin America, to arrive at this present where scientific discourse is used by narrators and poets to create novel assemblages between species, and to tackle the social and environmental crises brought about by the Antropocene.
SPAN 6666 - Specters of Latin America (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 6666, LATA 6666  
In this course, we will take an inter-and multidisciplinary approach that examines works of fiction, film, performance, and photography to explore how specters intervene in and mold the social, political, and cultural landscape of contemporary Latin America. We will discuss how different spectral figures challenge official narratives of memory, ground political authority, complicate transitions and endings, and fuel social movements and revolutions. As we engage with overlapping times, uncanny spaces, and restless bodies, we will also consider how spectrality shapes is shaped by the development of new media, the contemporary resurgence of populist discourse, the global migration crisis, and the urgency of ecological concerns.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2022  
SPAN 6835 - 21st Century Latin American Literature (3 Credits)  
This course explores Latin American literature from the 60's onwards, taking a look at the changing landscape, from the heyday of the Boom writers and Garcia Marquez' magical realism, to urban fiction in the nineties. We will study authors such as Garcia Marquez, Manuel Puig, Daimela Eltit, Roberto Bola?Alberto Fuguet, Mario Bellatin, and Mayra Santos-Febres.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023  
SPAN 6840 - Excess: Gender and Embodiment in Theory and Fiction (4 Credits)  
This course provides graduate students with an overview of feminist and queer theories of gender and the body, as well as representations of the gender and the body in narrative fiction. We will critical examine the discursive turn; in feminist theory as well as more recent challenges to this school of thought including new feminist materialism and critical disability studies. We will also look at the ways in which gender is inflection by sexuality, race, caste, and class.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021  
SPAN 6880 - Latin American Poetry and Poetics (3 Credits)  
This is a graduate survey course of Latin American poetry from the Popol Vuh until today. We will simultaneously study the construction of a poetic canon - major works, figures, and movements - and deconstruct it, examining popular productions, genre-defying works, and poetry in non-European languages. Guiding questions include: How does poetry in Latin America understand itself? How does poetry in Latin America conceive of its role vis-?is society, politics, and literature more broadly? Alongside figures such as Vallejo, Mistral, Sor Juana and Neruda, but also the anonymous author of the Apu Inka Atawallpaman. Mapuche poet Daniels Catrileo and the singers of cielitos in the Southern Cone, we will ultimately ask: what is poetry after the invention of Latin America?
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025  
SPAN 6895 - Cyborgs, Animals, and Monsters (3 Credits)  
In this course we will explore how Latin American science fiction and fantastic novels, graphic novels, short stories, and films from the modern and contemporary period have represented the figures of the animal, the monster, and the cyborg. The aim is to reflect on what these representations tell us about the shifting notions of race, gender, and ethnicity in the region, and to analyze how these weird bodies are able to challenge binary constructions such as civilization/barbarism, nature/culture, human/animal, normal/abnormal, and body/mind, while creating spaces for emerging alternative communities. Some of the authors to be read are Mario Bellatin, Samanta Schweblin, Leonora Carrington, and Martin Felipe Castagnet.