Faculty
Pedro Cabello del Moral
BA, Complutense University of Madrid. MA, Rey Juan Carlos University. MA, New York University. PhD, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Cabello del Moral is an international scholar and filmmaker. His research deals with representations of race, sexual dissidences, and disability in Spanish and Latin American contemporary film. Other research interests include cinema of migration, decolonial cinema, and activist documentaries. He is the author of the book Alianzas antimodernas: Estudios del Cine del Proceso 15M, forthcoming with the Spanish academic press Iberoamericana Vervuert. In this monograph about contemporary non-fiction Spanish cinema, he explores alliances between characters that had been marginalized within colonial modernity. Cabello del Moral has published several articles and book chapters, including “Trans Cinema from Spain,” forthcoming in The Handbook of Trans Cinema, Ed. Douglas Vakoch; “Coming Out Queer-Crip: Alliances in the New Spanish Disability Cinema,” forthcoming in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies; “Horizons of Radical Care and Crip Relationality in Fernando Franco’s La consagración de la primavera (2022),” forthcoming in Hispania (Special Issue: Disability Studies/Critical Disability Studies); “The Oppositional Gaze in the Argentine Cinema of Migration: Negotiating Chinese Identity and Coloniality of Seeing in Nele Wohlatz’s El futuro perfecto (2016),” in Contemporary Argentine Women Filmmakers, Eds. Mirna Vohnsen and Daniel Mourenza (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023); “Tomar la casa: Politics of haunting, contraarchivo y resistencia indígena en La llorona, de Jayro Bustamante,” in Ítsmica (2022); “El futuro de la juventud de El futuro, de Luis López Carrasco,” in ConSecuencias (2019); and “IXCANUL, una mirada kaqchikel contra el neoliberalismo y el neocolonialismo,” in Istmo (2019). As a filmmaker, Cabello del Moral has worked in all kinds of film and television productions in Spain and New York, specializing in nonfiction and transmedia projects. His documentary work tackles the struggles of LGBTQI+ activists, migrant justice collectives, and political prisoners of the Spanish Francoist dictatorship. SLC, 2026–
Previous Courses
Literature
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Open, Seminar—Fall
LITR 3543
Horror movies are a staple of recent Spanish cinema. With titles like The Others, The Orphanage, Buried, Rec, and Julia’s Eyes, directors Alejandro Amenábar, Juan Antonio Bayona, Paco Plaza, Jaume Balagueró, Rodrigo Cortés, Guillem Morales, and others have conquered the international market, attracting the attention of online platforms and theaters alike. Spanish horror mirrors the function that German Expressionism held in the Weimar Republic: it incarnates social anxieties in the figure of the monster. This genre rose to prominence during the long dictatorship of Francisco Franco, in which a similar typology of monstrous characters (vampires, werewolves, mad scientists, etc.) provided an allegorical cover and line of escape during a period of profound repression. This course will trace a genealogy between the key works of that historical moment and the present. We will tackle the resurgence of horror in the early 2000s in Spain, coinciding with the onset of aggressive neoliberal policies that led to the economic crisis of the 2010s. We will ask how recent horror movies, such as Carlos Vermut’s Magical Girl (2014), Carlota Martínez-Pereda’s Piggy (2022), and Mar Coll’s Salve Maria (2024) make sense of their political context. What distinguishes this new period of horror? How do these films renegotiate the toxic masculinity and macho aesthetics that traditionally characterize the genre? Where can we locate the influence of feminist, ecocritical, and anti-ableist social movements in this genre’s shifting aesthetics? Throughout the course, students will design an original research project and discuss its development in individual conferences with the instructor.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring
LITR 3064
This course will deal with a set of discourses and practices around the concept of españolidad (Spanishness). How has it been mobilized and by whom? What are its centers, its peripheries, and its boundaries? In order to critically examine these questions, the course will sample a wide range of materials comprising literary works, poetry, political and cultural essays, cinema (fiction and documentary), music, painting, visual art, comic, photography, and performance. This course will highlight works created by women and with strong female characters, featuring texts by Cristina Morales, Meryem El Mehdati, Silvia Albert Sopale, Alana S. Portero, Ana Penyas, and Federico García Lorca, among others. Throughout the course, students will design an original research project and discuss its development in individual conferences with the instructor. Additionally, students will work in groups to develop other research and curation projects. For group projects, students can choose between planning and guiding a visit to an exhibition or cultural event that relates to the course content, preparing and coordinating a guest visit to the class, or coordinating a cultural event open to the entire Sarah Lawrence College community. This will be a reading and writing intensive course. Students are expected to read full novels, theater plays, and long-form essays.
Faculty
Spanish
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Open, Seminar—Year
SPAN 3001
This introductory course will provide a solid base of grammar and vocabulary for students with minimal or no prior knowledge of Spanish. The study of the Spanish language will be complemented with the critical analysis of an array of Hispanophone cultural objects that highlight issues of colonialism, gender, and race. Through movies such La Llorona, Roma, La teta asustada, También la lluvia, short stories by Camila Sosa Villada, Ana Lydia Vega, Augusto Monterroso, Carlos Fuentes, Eduardo Galeano, poems by Julia de Burgos, Gloria Anzaldúa, Victoria Santa Cruz, and songs by Trueno, Villano Antillano, Bad Bunny, Nathy Peluso, Silvio Rodríguez, among others, students will explore historical and contemporary processes of Indigenous and Afro resistance, intersectional feminism, ecocriticism, and migrations. This course will provide students with opportunities to engage in cultural and artistic projects both individually and in groups. Students will create their own textbooks (cuadernos) with examples of the grammatical structures and vocabulary used in class. Students will also participate in group conferences around a specific topic related to the general theme of the course. During the conference, students will have an opportunity to expand course topics, practice their oral skills, and pose additional questions. In addition to class sessions and group conferences, weekly individual meetings with a Spanish language assistant are required. The course will focus on linguistic and communicative competence; that is why Spanish will be the only language spoken during class and it is required that students participate in all in-class activities. This will be a reading and writing intensive course. Students will read a selection of short stories and produce short writing assignments every week that will progressively increase in difficulty and number of words.
Faculty