This course provides an in-depth examination of empirical and theoretical literature in Culture and Cognition, encompassing foundational publications to the most recent impactful research in this field. It covers a wide range of topics and areas of research, offering students a detailed survey of research in Culture and Cognition.

An in-depth examination of selected topics in the Sociology of Culture. Topics in this course will vary from year to year. See the departmental website for details.

As social scientists, we are interested in understanding how social outcomes vary across different groups, or how such outcomes are related to other characteristics and variables of interest. To answer such questions, we often need to collect data and analyze that data in a statistical way. The course builds on fundamental techniques and methods to analyze quantitative data to draw inferences about social processes. Specifically, the course covers linear regression, generalized linear regression, and multilevel models. The emphasis of this course is not only to learn how to apply statistical techniques, but also to identify data issues that could potentially bias results.

This course introduces students to the field of computational social science, a set of commonly used computational tools, and their applications to question of sociological interest. New forms of digital data present enormous opportunities for social research. These data include the finegrained and time-stamped records of human behaviour and interactions online, massive troves of text and other "unstructured" data, and digitized documents and administrative records. Although often defined by the specific set of data sources and tools, computational social science can also be characterized by an attitude toward social research that appreciates the substantial opportunities afforded by the increasing availability of digitized data sources, an openness to novel methodologies, and a willingness to write lots of code and learn on the fly. This course seeks to cultivate this attitude. You will be introduced to a suite of currently popular methods, but you will also be encouraged to develop an aptitude and comfort with coding and to keep pace with the rapidly evolving computational toolkit in your subfield.

This course challenges of translating your general sociological interests into a research project, including formulating a practical research question, choosing appropriate data and methods, and communicating results in a way that engages with and contributes to the broader scientific literature. Like building a house from the ground up, the research process involves a set of practices that require careful implementation at each stage, but can also bring unforeseen challenges requiring strategic choices, hard thinking, reflection and compromise.The Doctoral Research Practicum is designed to guide doctoral students through the process of producing an original research paper, from the specification of an appropriate sociological question to the task of writing up one's findings in a defensible, publishable paper, and everything in-between. To accomplish this goal, students will conduct their own research, obtain, or produce data, conduct analysis, and develop a publishable paper that draws from this research by spring. We meet weekly to discuss each student's progress and suggest ways of improving the research. Toward this end, students will circulate, present, and evaluate each other's work in written and oral formats, receiving feedback from their peers, course instructors, and their advisors. Students will also provide response memos regarding how they address feedback with new versions of the paper.

Researchers use qualitative methods to study the everyday interactions, experiences, and meanings that contribute to, challenge, and sustain ideas, institutions, and inequalities. Qualitative researchers consider gender, race, class, and sexuality in public street behaviour; play during children's recess; support groups for women with post-partum depression; drag king and queen competitions; and survival strategies among the homeless. In these studies, researchers interview people, watch their behavior, participate in groups' activities, look at the documents and other texts that people produce, and try to immerse themselves in people's everyday experiences and meanings. The aim is usually to explore the relationship between the day-to-day and broader social structures and ideologies. The course may include: 1) data gathered through archival research, interviewing, and participant observation, 2) emotion as a source insight in qualitative research, and 3) writing as a means to record information, develop analyses, and share ideas.

Seminar discussions, in-class writing workshops, readings, and assignments may engage canonical, Chicago School, community-engaged, critical race, feminist, intersectional, and queer qualitative research. Readings will come primarily from sociology, and many appear on the Sociology Department's Qualitative Methods comprehensive exam list. Like qualitative methods, we will reach across disciplines and fields and types of authors. We will discuss readings, share work in progress, practice data collection and analysis, and apply ideas from the readings to our research projects and goals. We'll pay special attention to writing, thinking about how we can best use writing 1) to record the information we gather through observation or interviews, 2) to develop our analyses, and 3) to present our ideas to others. We’ll also grapple with the challenges of relying on writing to generate and convey our analyses. Throughout the semester we will consider how field methods illuminate, challenge, and sometimes reinforce social conditions; we'll also think about the influence of social conditions, including inequalities, on people's experiences as researchers and as research subjects.

This seminar analyzes the politics and practices of qualitative interviewing in local and global contexts. By addressing both its technical and theoretical aspects, the course examines: 1) the roles of qualitative interviewing in knowledge production and reproduction; 2) the constructive process and the inter-subjective dynamic of qualitative interviewing; 3) the technical aspects of asking questions and beyond; 4) doing reflexivity, hearing data, and interpreting silences. Using primary interview data about immigrant families from the Caribbean, China, Italy, and Sri Lanka, students will acquire first hand experience of doing qualitative interviewing by: 1) reading, commenting on, and revising good examples and mistakes from transcripts of 39 immigrant interviews; 2) carrying out and reflecting upon an in-class interview practicum; 3) analyzing interview process, coding interview transcript, and writing reflective essays; 4) engaging in and opening to constructive criticism.

This interdisciplinary graduate seminar focuses on mainly three qualitative research methodologies — archival research, ethnography, and oral history — with particular attention to significant ongoing debates regarding the epistemologies underpinning each of these. The course focuses on both the practical aspects of these methodologies and examples of works that employ them. An underlying aim of the course is to evaluate critically the dualisms central to positivism — a paradigm that is challenged, and yet continues to be influential as part of the "disciplinary unconscious" that informs contemporary social science and humanities scholarship.

The seminar challenges graduate students to discover and hone their teaching styles, to develop a personal philosophy about teaching and learning, to learn about the teaching resources that are available to them throughout the university and elsewhere, to experimentwith designing engaging courses of study, and to discover that teaching can be a rewarding and stimulating element of an academic career. The seminar will discuss the major components of a course, including course goals, topic outline, use of readings, use of class time, evaluation of students, and evaluating yourself. In each case, we will consider the options available and their strengths and limitations.

A detailed study of the external and internal history of the language. Topics treated: a brief outline of factors involved in linguistic evolution and language formation; fragmentation of Hispano-Latin into several Romance dialects; preliterary Spanish; medieval Spanish; formation of the literary language and the evolution of modern standards. The main features of the phonetic evolution from Latin to Spanish are studied with emphasis on the formation of speech sounds and the factors which spearheaded the mutations. It should be noted that the references to Latin are of a general nature and no formal knowledge of this language is required.

This course is designed for future teachers of Spanish who wish to strengthen their grammatical background. We will review traditional topics of Spanish grammar such as the verbal and pronominal systems, the two copula verbs, and issues on subordinate clauses. The course will focus on reflection on grammatical structures and detailed analyses of structures based on current analytic approaches to grammar. It will help students develop critical thinking and acquire conceptual tools to develop pedagogical strategies in the foreign language classroom, including basic form-oriented lessons and error analysis.

Target audience: MA and PhD students who have not taken a comparable course; not recommended for graduate students in Hispanic Linguistics.

Explore the foundations of the Spanish simple and complex sentences, with particular interest in grammatical topics of pedagogical interest. This course provides an introduction to the formal analysis of language applied to the basic grammatical construction of Spanish, covering topics in Spanish morphology (the analysis of word structure), Spanish syntax (the analysis of sentence structure) and semantics (the study of sentence and word meanings). Classroom activities focus on the analysis of actual language use, and the explanations for why speakers do what they do, rather than on prescriptive or stylistic approaches to grammar. Students will prepare a research project on one aspect of Spanish grammar of potential pedagogical interest.

This course is conceived as an introduction to the study of linguistic variation across the Spanish speaking world. It covers the central issues in phonological, morphological, and syntactic variation, analyzed from a geographical as well as from a social point of view.

This course introduces students to experimental approaches in linguistics, with a special focus on central topics in Hispanic linguistics. It will cover all aspects of experimentation, including hypothesis development, experimental design, and data-collection techniques. The course will also cover discussion and training in presentation of experimental results. Students will receive training in the use of different experimental and corpus analysis techniques and will discuss paradigmatic examples of research papers in the areas of phonetics-phonology and morpho-syntax. Students will undertake empirical research on a theoretically relevant dimension of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, or semantics of (any variety of) Spanish or Portuguese. This course is taught in English.

This seminar focuses on the internal structure of words and sentences. It will serve as an introduction to the main topics and theoretical discussions in Spanish morphology and aspects of syntax. Some of the topics to be covered include noun and verbal morphology, and opaque clitics. The focus on syntax will be on the structure of the verbal phrase, case theory, and movement. The course presupposes some familiarity with formal linguistics and basic grammatical notions. This graduate course complements other graduate courses in Spanish linguistic by covering the two other core areas of grammar: morphology and syntax. It also serves as the descriptive and theoretical basis for courses on acquisition and applied linguistics.

This course aims to provide students with theoretical background and experimental experience in second language speech learning. After providing a brief overview of second language (L2) models of speech learning and discussing the factors affecting L2 speech perception and production, the course will focus on the effects of phonetic training on the perception and production of L2 segmentals and suprasegmentals with L1-L2 language pairs that will include Spanish as the target language or the native language. The course will include a laboratory component in which students will develop skills in experimental design and data analysis. Taught in English.

The course introduces students to the main findings, theoretical models, and research methods in the field of second language acquisition and it surveys general issues such as the role of internal (e.g., native language, age) and external (e.g., input, context of learning) factors on second language development. The principal aim of the course is to promote discussion and critical reflection about the acquisition of Portuguese and Spanish as non-native languages and analyze phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic, and lexical aspects in the linguistic performance of bilingual speakers and learners of Portuguese and Spanish as a second language. The experimental component of the course provides students with experience in designing and carrying out studies in second language acquisition. Taught in English.

This course is an introduction to semantics both from a formal and an experimental perspective. We will discuss a variety of topics in dialects of Spanish and Portuguese, including bare nominals, definiteness, genericity, adjectives, ser and estar, modality, and number in the nominal and verbal domain. Students will gain a solid understanding of the core issues in formal and experimental semantics and will be introduced to the design and realization of a project in this field.

The basic concepts and analytic tools of linguistics applied to the study of Spanish, with a focus on the Spanish phonological, morphological, and syntactic systems. Theoretical discussion and practical exercises in analytic techniques.

This course is designed to guide reflection on what informs the decisions that are made in the planning, management, and delivery of academic projects, with an emphasis on language teaching. We will focus on core skills that students will adapt and apply to various contexts and projects. These include delivery-related skills (public speaking, effective communication, time management), and planning and management skills (basic information management and analysis, project management, assessment of outcomes, problem solving). We will start by considering pedagogy as a decision-making process, and then will explore some related ideas that support it: content knowledge, content representation, professional identity, and recontextualization.

This course offers a survey and analysis of Second Language Teaching Methods and provides a basic introduction to current theories of Second Language Acquisition. The aim of the course is to provide the fundamentals of pedagogical theory and to incorporate it to the empirical knowledge that a student might have, be that of a teacher of second language or that of a learner, in order to develop teaching strategies and the ability to critically analyze pedagogical materials such as language textbooks and other teaching resources. Special emphasis will be given to the role of the teacher as a learner of teaching and the impact that class activities and content have on the teaching and learning of Spanish as a foreign language.

This course will be an introduction to research on language acquisition from the perspective of generative grammar. We will explore the first and second language acquisition of aspects of Spanish syntax that are determined by lexical structure and lexical parameters. Students will be expected to participate in class discussion and activities and to present a report and a research paper on an experimental study on a topic to be determined in consultation with the instructor.

This course is intended to provide students with practical experience in undertaking laboratory research in Romance phonetics and phonology. This will be accomplished by having students undertake an experimental study of a phenomenon of their choice. Each class will involve an hour-long seminar, followed by an hour of hands-on experience in the lab. Discussion will center on foundational papers in experimental approaches to the study of segmental and prosodic phenomena.

This course is a guided introduction to the experimental research process, including hypothesis formulation, experimental design, data gathering, statistical analysis of data, and writing in the social sciences. Students will conduct a full-sized study on the acquisition of Spanish or another Romance language. The course aims to explore implications of syntactic theory for language development. Background in graduate level syntax or morphology is required.

This seminar will encourage a close reading of Don Quijote (1605/1615) while keeping in mind its medieval and renaissance literary intertexts, and the influence of the literary and socio-cultural debates and events that inform the text. Established and current scholarship will be critically examined to promote inquiry on the textual issues and a reflection on the state of the Quijote studies.

Study of the seventeenth-century Transatlantic Hispanic world that, after the epoch of the discovery and expansion in the sixteenth century, faces economic and political downfall. This downfall is accompanied by a social and spiritual crisis that results in the culture of baroque. Readings include classical theories of the baroque, of the 20th-century Latin American neobaroque, and of postmodernism. These theories serve as a backdrop to the reading of a selection of literary texts by such authors as Cervantes, Góngora, Quevedo, Sor Juana, Sigüenza y Góngora, Gracián, Zayas, and Calderón, and a selection of 20th century neobaroque Latin American authors.

The course explores forms of domesticity, the politics of domestic labour, stories of dwelling, and figures of the house in Latin American culture. We will explore how the household has been portrayed in Latin American culture as a contested node in a larger network of social, political, cultural, and physical interactions. Challenging its usual association with familiarity and the family, the home will be approached as a multi-layered and multi-species place that defies conceptions of the proper. Concepts such as biopolitics, necropolitics, social reproduction, and more-than-human relations will guide our discussions of selected films and literary texts. Some of the topics we will examine are the home as an allegorical figure for the nation in nineteenth-century literature; representations of domestic labour and the legacies of slavery; house and social utopia in modernist architecture; queer homes and multi-species households in literature and film; notions of possession and dispossession and their relationships to writing and film; occupations, experiments in communal living, and the homeless workers movement; and images from quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This course will examine the Spanish urban experience between the late 1800s and the present day. While our main focus will be on treatments of the city in novels, our literary approach will be further informed by considerations of other media as well as by theories relating to urbanism and architecture. Each student will be responsible for a seminar presentation and a research project. Spain's principal metropolises, Barcelona and Madrid, will be the primary (although not exclusive) subjects of this course. Authors and critics studied may include: Pérez Galdós, Mendoza, Martín-Santos, Rodoreda, Torres, Chacel, Sagarra, Ors, Espina, Gómez de la Serna, Sagarra, Simmel, Benjamin, Kracauer, Lefebvre, Harvey, Davis, and Soja.

Over the past twenty years, cultural studies in Spain have primarily focused on cities and the urban experience. This interdisciplinary course will take a new tack and explore both theoretical conceptions of "the rural" and cultural production and practices related to it. From early twentieth-century literary engagements with Spain's rural areas through to conceptual art dealing with themes of ruin and decay, and more recent insights from tourism and food studies, this course will challenge established notions of rural cultural production. At the same time, given the rise of regionalism beyond traditional nationalisms, the course will pay close attention to the Spanish state's plural nature. Genres and areas of study will include: essay, poetry, novel, documentary, feature film, gastronomy, and tourism studies.