BA, MA, MA, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. PhD, Tulane University. Venturini’s scholarship unveils representations of subaltern spaces, identities, and sexualities in Argentina and Spain in the 21st century in a way that makes their theoretical contributions more accessible. More specifically, her scholarship reveals the importance of those spaces as spaces of resistance, memory, and an alternative option to contemporary neoliberal capitalist systems. Her research examined a corpus of texts and films in which the representation of urban spaces produces a marginal cultural identity. Venturini has received fellowships from the Università della Calabria (Italy) and the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany) and was a visiting researcher at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). She is a collaborating member of the research group “Happiness in History: From Rome to Our Days. Discourse Analysis,” where she analyzes the relationship between happiness and childhood in contemporary Latin American and Spanish literature and visual culture. This group was developed within the scope of the Institute of Medieval, Renaissance, and Digital Humanities Studies (IEMYRhd) of the University of Salamanca, Spain. SLC, 2021–
Previous Courses
Spanish
Beginning Spanish: A Glimpse Into the Hispanic World through its Language and Culture
Open, Seminar—Year
This course aims to introduce students to the language and culture of the Spanish-speaking world and to promote the development of students’ communicative competence in Spanish. Additionally, the objective is to improve students’ intercultural understanding of—and social conscience about—problems that affect this cultural complex. From the beginning, students will be in touch with authentic Spanish-language films, TV shows, comics, and poems, as well as short literary and nonliterary texts. Throughout the semester, we will actively implement a wide range of techniques aimed at creating an atmosphere of dynamic oral exchanges. Grammatical structures will be taught by resorting to everyday situations and by the incorporation of a wide set of functional-contextual activities. Group conferences will help hone conversational skills, focusing on individual needs. Watching films, documentaries, and episodes of popular TV shows, as well as listening to podcasts and reading blogs and digital publications, will take place outside the seminar meetings and serve as material for class discussions and debates. Weekly conversation sessions with the language assistant are an integral part of the course, since the emphasis of the course is on the communicative approach.
Faculty
Ximena Venturini
Intermediate Spanish I: Latin American and Spanish Visual Culture
Intermediate, Seminar—Year
This course is intended for students who have had at least one year of college-level Spanish or the equivalent and who wish to review and expand the fundamentals of the Spanish language. With this, Latin American and Spanish comics, films, and TV shows—such as La casa de las Flores from Mexico, Paco Roca’s Los surcos del Azar, or Luis Ortega’s El Ángel—will provide the cultural and historical background for discussion in class. Films and TV shows work especially well for teaching language, because they can be used to quickly introduce or reinforce vocabulary or a grammatical point and also show their use, in context, by native speakers. Besides, space restrictions force comic-strip writers to get to the point, making comics a perfect source of useful vocabulary. The goal that most comic writers have of appealing to as many readers as possible also means that comics are a perfect source of basic, everyday terms and expressions. Students will gain key vocabulary for discussing cultural objects, write descriptive profiles, and even make their own comic book or record a podcast in Spanish. In addition, students will watch films, TV shows, and read comics outside the seminar meetings in order to reinforce the work that we do in class. Individual conference meetings will offer students an opportunity to complete independent research projects and to address individual language-acquisition needs. Weekly conversation sessions with a language assistant are also an integral part of the course.
Faculty
Ximena Venturini