Welcome to the Department of Spanish and Portuguese COVID-19 related information page. In this page we will post information pertinent to our Department. Be aware also of the latest information and updates about the impact of the COVID-19 virus on our college of LAS and university. See useful links for University and Graduate College websites on the coronavirus and related issues...
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As Head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, I would like to take this moment to express that as a community we stand against injustice, prejudice and intolerance at all levels. In these very unprecedented times let’s take a moment to reflect on how our daily actions can contribute to a better future of racial understanding and acceptance. Change has to be led not only through words but...
More Department News
- Ander Beristain Murillo and Jone Vicente Urrutia have received the highly prestigious Campus Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award. Both Ander and Jone received teaching awards at the College level and their nominations were...
- Our Department Head, Professor Mariselle Meléndez, has been named the first LAS Dean’s Fellow for Faculty Development. The position, which will start on January 2022, has been created to develop programs that enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion...
- Our PhD student Megan Gargiulo has received the highly competitive Humanities Research Institute Graduate Student Fellowship for her project "Gender, and Recogimiento: Discursive Representations of Space, Sexuality, and Productivity in Late Colonial Mexico." The fellowship will enable...
Calendar
SPAN 324 SEC B - SPRING 2021How we understand Latin American culture through the contributions of African slaves and African descendent people since the formation of the colonies to the present. How do we understand Latin American culture through the diverse contributions of African slaves and African descendent people since...
SPAN 308 - SPRING 2021Did you know that the United States now has over 50 million Spanish-speakers, making it the second largest Spanish-speaking population in the world, after Mexico? In this course, we will explore the past, present, and future of the many different Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S. The main...
SPAN 535 - SPRING 2021This course explores the transnational cinema of Mexican director Guillermo del Toro as a complete oeuvre with a particular aesthetic, technical and ideological project. It is a comprehensive study of a prominent filmmaker with a distinctly recognizable style that has captivated global audiences...
SPAN 307 - SPRING 2021What does it mean, in social and linguistic terms, to grow up speaking two languages or to learn a second language? This course is an introduction to the fundamental issues in the study of bilingualism as a sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic phenomenon, with special emphasis on Spanish bilingual...
SPAN 246 - SPRING 2021Taught in English, this course considers how gendered and sexed bodies have been imagined in contemporary Latina/o literature and visual culture (photography, digital graphics, murals, mixed media, music videos, and cinema/tv). Bodies out of Place: Destabilizing Geographies of Identity...
SPAN 254 - SPRING 2021An introduction to cultural analysis and interpretation. Students will analyze a range of cultural objects, including film, visual art, and literature, to think about how culture shapes our understanding of the world. Discussion will emphasize cultural issues in the context of Spain, Latin America...
SPAN 326 - SPRING 2021This course is an introduction to the classics of Mexican Cinema, from silent film until today. How has cinema shaped ideas about Mexican identity? How does it help us understand important events like the Mexican Revolution or key contemporary issues like immigration? We will explore this question...
SPAN 320 - SPRING 2021In this course, we will explore the construction of the image of Spain for foreign consumption from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. We will analyze the presence of Spain beyond its borders, including aspects such as military and economic colonialism, migration, tourism, sports,...
SPAN 312 - SPRING 2021This course will examine how both emigration and immigration have been portrayed in the Spanish literature and in others cultural manifestations since 1900 to the present. In order to analyze the different Spanish migrations, the course will explore the historical, political, social, and economic...
SPAN 232 - SPRING 2021Learn about and from Latinx immigrants living and working in Champaign-Urbana. As you learn about their strengths and challenges, you will see how their realities reflect larger issues of immigration on a global, national and regional scale. You will hear directly from local Latinx leaders and...
SPAN 332 - SPRING 2021Learn the fundamentals of social entrepreneurship, a practice that seeks opportunities at the nexus of languages, cultures and communities. We will focus on the question of how to create linguistically- and culturally-appropriate programming within nonprofits. To make those nonprofits sustainable...
SPAN 310 - FALL 2020This course will analyze dramatic texts from seventeenth-century Spain, paying especial attention to issues of racial, gender, and class identity, and how these themes can resonate to contemporary audiences. Beyond reading and interpreting dramatic texts, the emphasis of the course will be on...
SPAN 248 - FALL 2020TAUGHT IN ENGLISH, Gen Ed for “Literature and the Arts” and “US Minority Cultures;" The aim of this course is to study the relationships between Latinx and Latin American culture through film. It does so by focusing on a broad set of sociohistorical processes (migrations,...
SPAN 528 - FALL 2020According to Jacques Rancière art, like politics, is not by nature consensual, but rather “dissensual.” This is because of art's capacity to create not only identifications that are different from those which are given to us, but also identifications that at one point are believed to be unviable...
PORT 150 - FALL 2020This course looks at Brazilians in the U.S. through the interdisciplinary approaches of cultural studies and ethnic studies. Students will learn how Brazilian identity in the U.S. is not uniform or static, but rather historically contingent, plural, and contested, and how migrants and their...
SPAN 324 SEC A - FALL 2020This course focuses on the profound cultural and symbolic continuities and changes of religious myths and rituals in Latin America from the past to the present. Tracing religious texts and practices from the Pre-Colombian era, through colonialism and postcolonialism, through the present, this...
SPAN 324 SEC B - FALL 2020This course examines the relationship between food, culture and society in colonial Latin America and its impact on our society today including the US. Why we eat what we eat is a product of the encounters between these diverse societies (European, indigenous and African) in the past and the result...
SPAN 320 SEC X - FALL 2020This course serves as a panoramic introduction to Spanish literatures and cultures from the perspective of the non-heteronormative subject, from 1898 through the present. Under the label of queer the class includes a heterogeneous group of voices, experiences, historical figures and fictional...
SPAN 320 SEC D - FALL 2020In this course, we will explore the construction of the image of Spain for foreign consumption from the turn of the twentieth Century to the present. We will analyze the presence of Spain beyond its borders, including aspects such as military and economic colonialism, migration, tourism, sports,...
SPAN 312 - FALL 2020We will analyze some of Basque (Euskera), Galician, Catalan literature masterpieces by paying attention to issues of linguistic deterritorialization, politicization, visibility, and cultural translation. All of these languages have a long history and rich literatures. However, unlike Castilian,...
SPAN 572 - FALL 2020An overview of critical theories for the analysis of literary and cultural texts since the mid-20th century, including Spanish, Latin American, Luso-Brazilian, and U.S. Latinx schools of thought. On one level, this seminar functions as a presentational overview of major critical theories and...
SPAN 305 - FALL 2020An in-depth investigation of the structure of Spanish, with a secondary focus on syntactic variation, especially structural differences with English. Introduces concepts and techniques essential for syntactic analysis and description. Taught in Spanish. Prerequisite: SPAN 252 or consent of...
SPAN 468 - FALL 2020During the mid- and late-20 century, Latin American novels and short stories became international sensations, enjoying unprecedented commercial and critical success. “Fantastic Fictions” will examine several of the most celebrated canonical and emergent authors in Spanish America. From Borges to...
SPAN 202 - FALL 2020In this class you will actively use your Spanish every day, learn about being an effective bilingual professional and develop fundamental intercultural skills. CRN 32868 T/R 9:30 – 10:50 1024l Foreign Languages Building Prof. Ann Abbott, arabbott@...
SPAN 232 - FALL 2020In this service-learning course, you will learn with and from local Latinx immigrants as you volunteer two hours each week with a local organization that serves our immigrant community. Time in the classroom focuses on immigration policies, life in the “new Latino diaspora” and the headlines...
SPAN 308 - SPRING 2020Did you know that the United States now has over 50 million Spanish-speakers, making it the second largest Spanish-speaking population in the world, after Mexico? In this course, we will explore the past, present, and future of the many different Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S. The main...
SPAN 464 - SPRING 2020During the period we'll explore in this course, borders of all kinds dissolve, are smashed, and are reconfigured. At the beginning of this era we find the first recorded transgender wedding in Spain's history. The period closes with director Luis Buñuel releasing an English-language film, in...
SPAN 320 - SPRING 2020In this course, we will explore the construction of the image of Spain for foreign consumption from the turn of the twentieth Century to the present. We will analyze the presence of Spain beyond its borders, including aspects such as military and economic colonialism, migration, tourism, sports,...
SPAN 312 - SPRING 2020This course will examine how both emigration and immigration have been portrayed in the Spanish literature and in others cultural manifestations since 1900 to the present. In order to analyze the different Spanish migrations, the course will explore the historical, political, social, and economic...
SPAN 324 - SPRING 2020This course examines how the experiences of African slaves since their arrival with colonizing Spaniards to the Americas in the 16th century, culturally shaped what is known today as Latin America. Through music, food, dance, art, religion, labor and clothing, African migrants became part of...
SPAN 232 - SPRING 2020In this service-learning course, you will learn with and from local Latinx immigrants as you volunteer two hours each week with a local organization that serves our immigrant community. Time in the classroom focuses on immigration policies, life in the “new Latino diaspora” and the headlines...
SPAN 332 - SPRING 2020Learn the fundamentals of social entrepreneurship, a practice that seeks opportunities at the nexus of languages, cultures and communities. We will focus on the question of how to create linguistically- and culturally-appropriate programming within nonprofits. To make those nonprofits sustainable...
PORT 404 - SPRING 2020How is Brazil intertwined with and seemingly distinct from an American hemisphere? With some attention to class, gender, race and sexuality, this course explores the making of Brazil across the Spanish- and English-speaking Americas. SPRING 2020 - Tuesdays and Thursdays 11:00...
SPAN 326 - SPRING 2020This course is an introduction to the classics of Mexican Cinema, from silent film until today. We will examine genres like melodrama, horror, comedy, and the comedia ranchera, in order to think about the way in which film has crystalized ideas about Mexican identity. We will study Mexican stars...
SPAN 467 - SPRING 2020This course explores why many authors turned to romance in order to rethink categories of race and gender. We will delve into stories of forbidden love that feature slaves, bandits, lepers, and prostitutes in order to consider how Latin American identity was rewritten in the nineteenth century....
SPAN/LLS 246In this course, we will engage with the diverse and unique ways writers and artists perform and tell stories about their Latinidad. With special attention to deviance and divadom, the course materials underscore how Latinx women and LGBTQ persons push the limits of gender and sexuality in our...
SPAN 535This seminar focuses on the implications, possibilities, and failures of a Latin America “of sex” or rather a Latin America “with a sexuality.” In The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Michel Foucault posits, “We...are in a society of ‘sex,’ or rather a society ‘with a sexuality’: the mechanisms of...
SPAN 466This course will offer a cultural and critical perspective of the way ecology, natural disasters, and human actions are intrinsically intertwined. In recent years powerful earthquakes in Mexico, the strongest hurricane ever recorded devastating the island of Puerto Rico in 2017, and severe...
SPAN 468This course will examine the evolution of discourses on nature in Latin American literature and film throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will dig into texts that thematize the environment, and examine how they refer to the conservation and destruction of nature. Students will...
SPAN 326In this course, we will study representations of animals in Latin American culture and examine why writers and artists thought with animals to work through human questions of gender, race, and sexuality. Specifically, we will look at topics including metamorphosis, pets, evolution, indigenous...
SPAN 324This course examines the relationship between food, culture and society in colonial Spanish America and its impact on our society today. Why we eat what we eat is a product of the encounters between diverse societies (European, indigenous and African) in the past and the result of subsequent...
SPAN 326In this course, we will study the aesthetic representations of sex and sexuality in Latin American literary and artistic work from the mid-twentieth century to the present. With special attention to the influence—and resistance—of feminist, queer, and critical race theories, we will address the...
SPAN 590When we become immersed in the stories of others, our own lives change, for better or worse, for a few seconds or for years. How do storytellers use the potential for empathy to affect readers or viewers? What are the ethical implications of these uses? Participants will explore these questions by...
SPAN 535This course seeks to explore visions of the metropole in Caribbean and U.S. Caribbean cultures. To what extent do real-and-imagined urban spaces constitute a site of containment, possibility, uneven development, hybridity and/or homogenizing hegemony in Caribbean cultural production? How does...
BASQUE 401Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people spoken in the north of Spain and south of France. BASQ 401 aims to provide students with basic communication in Basque, and endeavors to enhance students’ appreciation for Basque language and culture via realia and select readings on a variety...
SPAN 465The indignados movement marked a before and an after in the contemporary history of Spain. In the field of literature, this moment coincides with a return of engaged literature, as the current reality requires a writer who assumes the responsibility to denounce and make visible the...
SPAN 324What do tangible objects such as textiles, silverwork, maps, books, jewelry, paintings, clothing, furniture, kitchen utensils, and food tell us about the history and culture of Latin America? How through the history of objects can we learn about the identity construction of people in the colonial...
PORT 403This course aims to break open the singular idea of “Brazil” to reveal many Brazils, exposing students to the tremendous regional diversity that both enriches and complicates our understanding of the Federative Republic. Brazilian Regionalisms Brazil is a country of continental proportions—larger...
PORT 404This course will familiarize students with the broad trends and debates in Brazilian social and historical thought during the long 20th century. Course taught in English We will pay particular attention to the notions of race, ethnicity, and nation, focusing on seminal texts by some Brazil’s most...
SPAN 326 GAs one of the most divisive issues of our time, immigration has quickly become a major topic of focus in literature, film, and journalism. This course will examine Latin American immigration and emigration as social, political, and cultural phenomena. We will study novels, plays, newspaper articles...
SPAN 326 FThis course will critically consider the construction of a new Latin American international cinema from a Cultural Studies approach, investigating how it fulfills or disrupts desires for a borderless world, how it represents local and global conflict, whether it successfully “translates” the...
SPAN 590The course will explore the politics, emotions and aesthetics of change in the context of modern and contemporary Spanish culture. “Change” will be understood in a broad sense, including conversion, metamorphosis, revolution, exchange, substitution or deviation. Particular attention will be paid...
SPAN 468Buenos Aires. Mexico City. Bogotá. Rio de Janeiro. The Virtual City. How does one “read” the contemporary urban metropolis of Latin America, whether real or imagined? Megacities are ever-present in Latin American cultural production, portrayed either through narratives of progress and modernization...
