Greater Mexico and Migration On Screen

This course explores how cinema produced in the United States and Mexico, from the silent period to the contemporary moment has mediated and commented on the presence of Mexicans in what is today the US, as well as on the migratory experience. Because cinema is an industrial art form, we will examine the impact of social, historical, and political conditions as well as the impact of global economic structures on cinema throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will acquire knowledge of the periods of US and Mexican cinema history and a familiarity with critical approaches to the...

Advanced Introduction to Latin American Cinema

This advanced introductory course on Latin American cinema familiarizes students with the three fundamental areas of expertise that shape scholarship in the field: 1) the techniques of filmic analysis; 2) film theory; and 3) the history of film production in the region from the silent period through contemporary cinema. This overview will both consider Latin America’s filmic production as a triangulated phenomenon with respect to production in the US and Europe, as well as interrogate its national and regional implications. Students will produce 2 written papers, article summaries, and an...

Melodrama in Latin American Culture

This course explores the social and political history of melodrama in Latin America. We will discuss the role melodrama has had within Latin American media following a long-term chronological approach that begins with nineteenth-century serialized novels (folletín) and ends with recent telenovelas from Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina. As a language of emotions and familiarity, Spanish-speaking melodrama has been a key tool to reflect on the most critical social and political issues, from mid-twentieth-century populisms to globalization, from modernization to the human rights...

Theory and Literary Criticism. Latin American & Iberian Arguments

What is “theory”? What do we do with it? How does theory allow us to see our objects of study differently, or even to formulate new objects of inquiry? This course provides an advanced introduction to a wide range of critical theories and schools of thought for the analysis of literary and cultural objects. The course proposes a long-term approach from the early twentieth century to the present, covering foundational paradigms as well as the more recent turns, including: New Criticism, Formalism, Marxism, Post-Structuralism, Feminism, Gender Studies and Queer Theory, Post-Colonial Theory,...

Scary stories: The strange, the monstrous, and the supernatural in Spanish and Latin American texts

Scary stories help us process deep human fears and anxieties, but they also offer a reflection of larger cultural anxieties. We’ll examine stories and films from a variety of historical periods and Spanish-speaking regions, allowing ourselves to experience them both emotionally and intellectually. Taught in Spanish.  Prerequisite: SPAN 228.CRN 79680T/TH 2:00 – 3:20; 301 Architecture Bldg.Instructor: Joyce TolliverImage credit: The Souls of the...

Tourism, Modernization, and Environment: Imagining Spain in Contemporary Cultural Production

This course explores the intersections of tourism, modernization, and the environment in contemporary Spain through the analysis of diverse forms of cultural production from 1880 to 2025. Focusing on the country’s process of economic modernization—especially in the contexts of developmentalism, neoliberalism, and the changes resulting from the 2008 economic crisis—we will examine how mass tourism has shaped urban growth, the construction of national and regional identities, and the circulation of discourses about Spain’s cultural difference (“Spain is different,” according to the famous 1960s...

Strange Worlds

The focus of SPAN 312 is the critical analysis of selected texts and periods representative of Spain's literary production from the 18th century to the present, with special attention paid to broader literary and cultural contexts. In this section of SPAN 312, we will study texts within the thematic frame of ‘strange worlds’: fictional works that portray seemingly otherworldly, fantastic, and speculative experiences, ranging from strange encounters with robots and ghosts, tales of madness, to horrific depictions of warfare and strange post-apocalyptic stories of survival. We will study how...
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