Spanish

The Politics of Melodrama in Latin American and Latinx Cultures

This course explores the social and political history of melodrama in Latin American and Latinx cultures. We will discuss the role that 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, Argentina, and the United States. 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...

Race and Nation in Argentine Popular Culture

This course explores Argentine popular culture by focusing on the interplay between race and nation. We will follow a long-term chronological approach from the nineteenth century to the present, examining the formation of a plebeian culture from gauchesca poetry to sports icons like Diego Maradona, from early-twentieth-century tango recordings to contemporary cumbia villera. We will cover a broad spectrum of cultural production —literature, music, cinema, comics, and television— as well as other dimensions of popular culture such as soccer/fútbol. The course will delve...

Desired and Policed: Paradigms of Spanish Womanhood

This course examines ideologies of Spanish womanhood in Spanish culture (literature, essay, visual art) produced between 1800-1936. Special attention will be given to pressing issues in women’s lives, such as marriage and domesticity, motherhood, divorce, wage labor, femininity, and sexuality. Thus, we will examine the prototype of womanhood conceived by both men and women during the 19th and 20th centuries, including the construction of the “angel in the house,” the femme fatale, and the modern new woman. Prerequisite: SPAN 228 MWF 10:00-10:50 am; 217...

Print and Power in 19th-Century Latin America

This course examines the long nineteenth century in Latin America (1790–1910), focusing on the interplay between literature and politics. Delving into the turbulent processes that shaped modern Latin America, students will explore theoretical debates surrounding the creation of the new republics. Students will analyze print media—including pamphlets, newspapers, essays, popular poetry, foundational romances, and textbooks—to examine how these transformations redefined key concepts such as citizenship, gender roles, racial identities, and class structures. The course will cover both canonical...

Travel Writing in Colonial Latin America

This course explores different forms of travel writing from 1492 until 1820 to understand mobility as a complex gendered and racialized experience. When we talk about “adventurers,” “explorers,” or “travelers,” we tend to imagine them embodied in a masculine figure. In this course, we will focus on the limits of this idea of travel, analyzing travel as a gendered and racialized experience. Throughout the semester, we will study different types of mobility, travel, and travel literature created by different people in and about Latin America, from 1492 until 1820. These various travelogues...

Tourism, Modernization, Environment, & Difference: Imagining Spain & Other in Spanish Cultural Production

This course considers changing notions of travel and its association with processes of   modernization, mass consumption, nation building, and climate change in Spain from the 19th C to the present. It will examine non-fictional texts (e.g. essays,  newspaper articles, travel writing)—alongside a range of cultural production including literature (short stories, graphic novels), visual culture (painting, photography), and film.  Prerequisite: SPAN 228 or consent of instructor.T/TH 2:00-3:...

Beyond Braceros, Narcos and Latin Lovers: Latin American and Latinx Film

SPAN 248 (LLS 248) - SPRING 2026TAUGHT IN ENGLISH, Gen Ed for “Literature and the Arts” and “US Minority Cultures;" This course studies the relationships between Latinx and Latin American culture through exciting films. It focuses on a set of current and relevant topics (migrations, assimilation and integration, ICE, political struggles, globalization, nationalism and transnationalism). No prerequisites. Lecture (AL1) is Online and Sections Face to Face (in person).The class will expose and go beyond stereotypes about Latinx...

Mexican National Cinema

This course explores how Mexican cinema, from its beginnings at end of the 19th century through 21st century production, has commented on and participated in major social and national processes such as the Mexican Revolution, the (re)construction of national identity, modernization, as well as the negotiation of changing conceptions of class, gender, and race. We will analyze canonical, landmark films as well as lesser-known works to explore how a variety of directors and genres have engaged the country’s national imaginary through time. As film is an industrial art form, we will examine the...

Realisms in Latin American Cinema

Is one form of cinema more truthful than any other? Are realist styles any more ethical with regards to the depiction of marginalized populations? How and why has realism become an idiom of prestige for Latin American films on the festival circuit? For nearly a century, cinemas purporting to offer an alternative to entertainment films have attempted to situate themselves within a privileged relationship to realism in contradistinction to the notions of pleasure, distraction, and deception that critics have identified as inherent to the commercial movie industry. Taking as its point of...

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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