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.

This seminar will examine the notion of auteurship in cinema as it relates to Spanish film production. We will consider different Spanish film auteurs, including Buñuel, Berlanga, Bardem, Saura, Martin Patino, Almodovar, Bigas Luna, Miro, and Medem. Specific consideration of how the socio-cultural horizon of their respective periods and spectatorship contribute to their status as "auteurs" will be made, in addition to analyses of such fundamental elements as mise-en-scene and thematic preoccupations in their cinema. This seminar will have a strong theoretical component and will contribute to students' "film literacy."

Major works of twentieth-century Spanish drama, studied in relation to influential plays from the formative period of the Spanish theatrical tradition (1580-1680). Parallel readings of modern and early modern plays, with a focus on modernist forms of drama, theatre and the visual arts, and the dramatic uses of popular traditions. Particular attention will be given to early modern precedents for modernist experimentation with the genres and techniques of Spanish theatre. Playwrights to be studied will include Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón, Valle-Inclán, Lorca, Alberti, and Buero Vallejo.

This course offers an in-depth exploration of a specific topic in Latin American literature and culture. The focus of the course will vary each time it is taught and will be determined by the instructor in accordance with their research interests.

The narratives selected for this course are deeply involved with matters of the relationship between literatures and the world and they bear witness to a crisis in the mimetic contract that affects: 1) the connections between the work and the referential world; 2) the relationship between different levels and components of fictions, and 3) the ongoing dialogue with other works. Readings may include fictions from a range of historical periods of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and from diverse national and transnational origins, as well as those that engage with other genres and political or aesthetic practices.

Latin American Narratives of Resistance have been produced during every stage of historical development of the region, from the early 16th century period of explorations and conquest to our 21st century era of Post, Trans, and Hyper-national enterprises. Contemporary narratives of resistance are intrinsically related to diverse causes such as national liberation struggles, indigenous movements, global and environmental concerns, identity politics, animal rights, and accessibility. The seminar will focus primarily on narratives from the region of Latin America known as the Bolivarian nations: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú, and Venezuela. We will study narratives of resistance as expressed through essays, manifestos and declarations, testimonios, poetry, song lyrics, short stories, novels, documentaries, and film.

This course considers the notion of the icon as site of cultural production and circulation in Latin American contexts, focusing on transformative processes and practices of embodiment, collection, devotion, and sensation. Readings in literature, film and other media emphasize the unique roles of cultural objects as conduits to expressions of vulnerability, violence, and collective desire. The course builds on new materialist theories in its approach to the icon as sensory object, but also as a sign, while engaging the fluidity between living bodies and inanimate matter.

This course examines written and visual accounts of contagious diseases and of disease control in Latin America. We will depart from nineteenth century shifts in the discourses of tropical medicine brought about by the microbiological revolution and their implications for the imperial prospects of capitalist expansion in Latin America, and finish with art production in the context of Zika, dengue, and COVID-19. Topics of study include fever as an aesthetic device; cinema and hygiene; the (in)visibility of contaminants; infrastructure, deforestation and disease ecologies; nation building and the racialized fear of the contagious body; DDT contamination, and virus and globalization. Using materials as varied as literary novels, drawings, newspaper chronicles, and photographs, we will build a critical vocabulary that will guide us through the ruptures and continuities between current and past disease stories. Course taught in English.

This course proposes a series of encounters between models derived from Latin American literary and cultural studies, and from Disability Studies. We will consider the ways in which these models change and mutually illuminate one another through their possible points of contact. Discussion will focus not only on the long history of representations of disability and corporeal difference in Latin America, with emphasis on Mexico, but in addition on the processes of interaction between bodies and the production and circulation of discourse and cultural objects. The course includes contemporary and twentieth century Latin American narrative and cultural production, along with theoretical texts. Topics may include the history of the medicalized body, eugenics, Otherness and the tropology of monstrosity, disability aesthetics, and disability as critical methodology.

Spanish America has produced a large number of poets of great international importance, including two Nobel Prize winners. This course covers Spanish American poetry in cultural context through the late 19th century Modernismo movement to the Neo-Baroque aesthetics of the late 20th century and the present time. It will focus on key themes in Spanish American culture: postcolonial identity, resistance culture, exile and migration, memory. The authors discussed range from Martí, Vallejo, Neruda, and Mistral, to Paz, Mir, Pizarnik, Perlongher, and Reina María Rodríguez.

This course is based on the premise that literature and art are produced within a broader cultural context, and that contemporary authors and visual artists draw not only from international theories of aesthetics and form, but also from each other's production. In the contemporary moment, the distribution, and dissemination of images and text through the web and social networking facilitates the interactions and overlaps that create a fertile discourse amongst young cultural producers today. In this class, the students will learn about newly established and up-and-coming writers and artists from Argentina and Mexico, examining not only their work and their online visibility, but also the institutional and discursive structures that facilitate and shape their production. Discussion will be in Spanish and at a high level, since it will involve direct communication with writers and artists from Latin America.

This course will approach the political genealogies and implications of the global circulation of images through the perspective of Latin American studies, drawing examples from the colonial period to the present. The readings will focus on photographic medium, although we will also discuss other examples throughout the course. We will examine the main contributions of Latin American artists, writers, and scholars to the methodological and theoretical debates in the field of visual culture. Additionally, we will examine how visual practices, languages, and archives shed new light on central themes in Latin American studies, such as colonial image wars, technologies of racialization and surveillance, violence and memory, Indigenous and environmental activism, literature, and photography. Ultimately, we will focus on how each of these topics allows us to think of images not in isolation, but entangled with bodies, commodities, ideas, and the material structures and networks that enable their circulation to take place.

This course will examine the rearticulation of local identities and the emergence of alternative subjectivities in contemporary cultural production from Cuba, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Analyzing a wide variety of historical, sociological, political, filmic, and literary texts, we will explore theoretical debates surrounding the notions of hybridity, race, exile, nationhood, and insularism. Such analysis will ultimately help us reconsider the specific postcolonial dilemmas of the Hispanic Caribbean within the larger context of globalization.

This seminar offers an approach to a corpus of literary theory and criticism from the twentieth century to the present. Discussions and assignments will focus on the descriptive, analytical, and practical study of texts representing key theoretical tendencies relevant to the study of literary and cultural production. Readings may include literary works that act as theoretical projects, or through which we can observe the potential of various critical perspectives.

This course will examine a long-standing tradition in Spanish American literature: the essay of cultural self-definition. Analyzing seminal texts from 19th and 20th centuries, we will explore the subtleties of a cultural critique that both map and query Latin American culture on its way to modernity. Authors will include: Sarmiento, Martí, Rodó, Mariátegui, Reyes, Henríquez Ureña, Paz, Lezama Lima, González, García Canclini.

This course engages the problem of its own point of departure: when and where do we locate a Mexican (post)revolution, and with what parameters may we begin to frame it? The question is more than a strictly formal one, because of the many Mexican intellectuals whose work has merged ideological or aesthetic orientations with programmatic reflections on the nature of nationally specific historical time. Through analysis of works by writers and intellectuals of the early to mid-twentieth century, such as Alfonso Reyes, José Vasconcelos, Juan Rulfo, and Agustín Yáñez, as well as later figures including Roger Bartra, Carlos Monsiváis, Claudio Lomnitz, and Sara Sefchovich, we will consider what is at stake politically, philosophically, and ethically in these textual negotiations of Mexican time and history.

This course focuses on a corpus of recent literature by established and emerging Mexican authors. Readings are framed through the malleable concept of transparency, understood in aesthetic terms as a quality allowing for the penetration of light, and unobstructed visibility, but also as a political concept, a position or strategy of revealing or purporting to reveal complete, accessible truths. In the political sphere, the notion of transparency has achieved currency as a defining discourse of public life, particularly in response to potential or real accusations of violence, and subsequent obfuscations. In this context, language and action become situated in relation to demands for evidence, and for particular modes of self-revelation. Literary works, such as the novels and other texts to be studied in this course, participate in a related, overlapping dynamic, in which narrative voice and aesthetics negotiate their proximity and affect vis à vis the histories and worlds that shape them.

An individual student may propose a series of readings and assignments on a topic of academic interest and relevance to their degree. The topic, materials, and requirements are selected and designed in consultation with a graduate faculty member who agrees to supervise and evaluate the student's work.

This course seeks to develop students' writing and presentation skills in order to allow them to disseminate their research more effectively. It will expose students to the research tools available in each discipline and will train them to find support for their research and to disseminate it in academic and non-academic venues. The course seeks to create an interdisciplinary environment, mimicking the one found in most language departments, where students have to discuss their research with an educated but heterogeneous audience.

This course provides a structure and credit for students' engaging in research activities beyond coursework. The course allows students to engage in a research project outside of their coursework, or in research training and production that goes beyond the requirements and expectations of a course paper.