Spanish

This class is for students who have had some experience with Spanish but are still laying the foundations of communication and comprehension. We will do a thorough review of basic grammatical, lexical, and syntactical concepts at a more accelerated pace than the regular Beginning Spanish class. Working with music, visual art, film, and newspaper articles from both Latin America and Spain, students will develop the ability to navigate real-life situations and will expand their vocabulary through group exercises with a communicative focus. Weekly conversation sessions are also a fundamental part of this course.

The aim of this course is to enable students without previous knowledge of the language to develop the skills necessary to achieve effective levels of communication in Spanish at a basic level. From the start, students will be in touch with authentic language materials in the form of films, TV series, video clips, documentaries, newspaper articles, and songs, as well as short stories and poems. In the regular class meetings, we will actively implement a wide range of techniques aimed at creating an atmosphere of dynamic oral exchange. The study of grammar will take place by combining the theoretical study of morphological and syntactic structures with the exploitation of everyday situations through the incorporation of a wide set of functional-contextual activities and resources. An important component of this class is group work. Students will participate in several collaborative projects with fellow members of the class throughout the semester. Weekly conversation sessions with the language assistant are an integral part of the course.

This course is designed for students who have at least one year of Spanish at the college level or more in high school. Through extensive grammar review and engagement with authentic materials, students will broaden their vocabulary, hone their verbal and written communication, as well as improve their reading and analytical skills. We will discuss topics relevant to Latin American societies—such as health, education, migration, environmental concerns, gender and sexuality, race, historical memory, and technology—through poetry, short stories, documentaries, films, music, and legislation. We will carefully discuss the cultural productions of Samanta Schweblin, Andrés Wood, Valeria Luiselli, Elizabeth Acevedo, Sebastián Borensztein, and Cristina Cabral, among many others. In addition to class time, you will complete an individual conference project each semester and attend a conversation session every week with a language tutor.

What is the reality of the Caribbean beyond stereotypes of a tropical paradise for vacationers from abroad? What can the region teach us about art, politics, and revolution? In this class, we will consider different definitions of, and approaches, to the Caribbean and its positioning in relation to Latin America, Europe, and the United States regarding questions of race and ethnicity, colonialism and slavery, revolution, gender and sexuality, migration, and diaspora. We will analyze literature, theory, art, film, and music by the likes of Alejo Carpentier, Fernando Ortiz, Wilfredo Lam, and Sarah Gómez. This discussion-based course is intended for students who wish to further hone their communication and comprehension skills through advanced grammar review.

In this seminar, we will analyze how Latin American women reflected on traditional gender roles, heteronormative standards, intricate racial systems, class dynamics, technology, and environment concerns in their literary and cinematographic works. Through advanced grammar review and writing workshops, students will hone their communication, analytic, and essay-writing skills in Spanish. Readings include texts by Aida Cartagena Portalatín, Cristina Cabral, Gabriela Mistral, and María Fernanda Ampuero; films include La ciénaga, El último verano de la Boyita, and Fever Dream, among many others. Students will complete an individual project.

What lessons can we draw from contemporary Latin American and Latinx films about Black subjects’ perceived and actual presence in these societies? How can the seventh art shape our perceptions and understanding of hegemonic ideologies about Blackness circulating in Latin American societies? In this seminar, we will critically reflect on these questions by analyzing films produced in the last two decades centering on the theme of Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx’s nuanced experiences. Alongside learning the vocabulary and developing tools for basic film analysis, we will discuss polemics around authorship in cinema. Through advanced grammar review and writing workshops, students will hone their communication, analytic, and essay-writing skills in Spanish. Films include Afroargentinos, Chocó, Pelo malo, Entre fuego y agua, and La soledad, among many others. Students will complete an individual project.

This course examines Latin America in the making. From the time of Andean ayllus to the contemporary battles between the populist left and the populist right, this lecture course offers a survey of the more than five centuries of the history of the region that we know as Latin America. Although the region’s history is deeply embedded in global processes of capitalist expansion, imperial domination, and circulation of Western ideas, this course attempts to look at Latin America from the inside out. The course examines the ways in which landowners and campesinos, intellectuals and workers, military blacks, whites, and mestizos understood and shaped the history of this region and the world. The course will examine the rise and fall of the Aztec and Inca empires, the colonial order that emerged in its stead, independence from Iberian rule, and the division of the empire into a myriad of independent republics or states searching for a “nation.” In the second part of the course, by focusing on specific national trajectories, we will ask how the American and Iberian civilizations shaped the new national experiences and how those who made claims on the “nation” defined and transformed the colonial legacies. In the third and final portion of the course, we will study the long 20th century and the multiple experiences of, and interplay between, anti-Americanism, revolution, populism, and authoritarianism. We will ask how different national pacts and projects attempted to solve the problem of political inclusion and social integration that emerged after the consolidation of the 19th-century liberal state. Using primary and secondary sources, both fiction and film, the course will provide students with an understanding of historical phenomena such as mestizaje, caudillismo, populism, reformism, corruption, and informality, among other concepts key to the debates in contemporary Latin America. The course meets for one weekly lecture and one weekly group conference. Aside from mandatory attendance and participation, the requirements for the course include an individual exam, a collaborative research project, and a primary source analysis.

In this course, we will examine fictional works from all over the Spanish-speaking world, as well as a small number of representative Luso-Brazilian texts originally written in Portuguese. We will begin our exploration by reading pioneering works by Fernando Pessoa (Portugal) and Emilia Pardo-Bazán (Spain). We will then proceed to study the legacy of foundational authors of the Latin American canon, including Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Juan Rulfo (Mexico), and María Luisa Bombal (Chile). As we read, we will analyze the sociopolitical and aesthetic implications of a number of concepts associated with the literatures of the Spanish-speaking Americas—such as the notion of “magical realism,” a term that needs careful deconstruction since it has profound connections with forms of fantasy practiced globally in different literary traditions. We will pay careful attention to the African and indigenous roots of the Latin American imagination as it blended with the legacy of European literature. Fiction written by women authors will constitute one of our main lines of investigation. In this context, we will study fictions by Clarice Lispector (Brazil), Rosario Ferré (Puerto Rico), and Rosario Castellanos (México), among others. The essential goal of this course is to acquire and develop critical reading and writing skills. Active participation in class debates on the different literary texts under study will be an essential factor of the course work. Throughout the semester, you will be required to keep a handwritten journal in which you will record your trajectory in the class. Periodically, you will write short, formal reflections and analytical commentaries discussing aspects of the books read (frequency to be determined). We will meet in individual conferences on a weekly basis in the fall and biweekly in the spring. Each term, you will work on a specific project whose nature and scope will be discussed with me at the beginning of each term. At the end, you will produce a paper in the form of an essay (length to be determined). After a thorough examination of canonical texts in the fall, the spring semester will center on the study of recent Latin American literary works and their connections with fiction produced in other parts of the world.

Many of the works of Jorge Luis Borges—the highly influential, 20th-century Argentine writer and oft-cited founder of the magic realism literary genre—mirror mathematical concepts in profoundly intelligent and strikingly imaginative ways. Borges’ writings—primarily short fictions but also essays and poetry—often introduce alternate realities that warp standard notions of time, space, and even existence. Borges' works serve to uncover intriguing frictions between competing notions in the foundations of mathematics: the sensible vs. the paradoxical (logic), the infinite vs. the infinitesimal (set theory), the discrete vs. the continuous (analysis), the symmetric vs. the distorted (fractals and chaos), the convergent vs. the divergent (limits), and the likely vs. the impossible (probability). Not restricting itself to mathematics, this course will also explore themes and images in Borges’ works from philosophical, mythological, historical, scientific, psychological, and literary perspectives. Student conference work may focus upon other explorations at the intersection of literature, magic realism, mathematics, philosophy, etc. This course is intended for the student who is curious and open-minded though had never planned to study mathematics at the college level.

How does the human mind represent the world? And how do these representations vary across people? Could knowing a different language change how we experience time or even how we see color? Even seemingly simple concepts like “in” vs. “on” mean different things in different cultures, and words like “one” and “two” may not be linguistically universal. Indeed, the very course description that you are reading makes culturally-specific assumptions about psychology and implicitly assumes objectivity. At the same time, humans seem to share certain core experiences, such as perceiving events, creating categories, and recalling the past. Which aspects are shared, and which are unique? In this course, we will draw on research from psycholinguistics, cognitive development, and cultural psychology to learn cognitive science in a larger context. Critically, we will consider how each of those fields have been severely constrained by an emphasis on white, Western, industrialized experiences. We will investigate the broader social and ethical consequences of these assumptions and explore insights and challenges that emerge when we step out of this limited perspective. We’ll draw on primary and secondary sources, including research articles, literature, videos, raw experimental data, and audio recordings. Students will develop projects in conference work that combine their interests with the course content, such as designing an experiment to test cross-linguistic differences in visual attention, analyzing vocabulary from languages other than English, or replicating and reinterpreting an existing experiment using culturally-responsive practices.

This is a course for creative writers who are interested in exploring nonfiction as an art form. We will focus on reading and interpreting outside work—essays, articles, and journalism by some of our best writers—in order to understand what good nonfiction is and how it is created. During the first part of the semester, writing will be comprised mostly of exercises and short pieces aimed at putting into practice what is being illuminated in the readings; in the second half of the semester, students will create longer, formal essays to be presented in workshop.