Current Graduate Courses

Winter 2022

SPA 206- Spanish Syntax-Claudia Sanchez-Gutierrez- Canceled

SPA 257- Spanish Literature of the Renaissance & Golden Age: Drama- Nicholas Jones
This graduate seminar will examine the representation of race, gender, sexuality, and power in early modern Spanish drama. Taking a chronological frame, we will cover these themes beginning with medieval Iberian pageantry and ending with the works of Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. To guide and nuance our class discussions and readings, we will interrogate the staging and performance of race, gender, and sexuality along the lines of: courtly and civic coronations, pageantry, and tournaments; the Renaissance underworld of La Celestina; the short-skit interludes of Lope de Rueda; Lope de Vega and the comedia nueva; African dances and blackface performance; cross-dressing and gender dissidence in Tirso de Molina and Sor Juana; queer readings of Agustín Moreto’s El lindo Don Diego; celebrity and the stardom of actors; clothing, cosmetics, and stage props; and, architecture, urban space and cities. 

 

SPA 279: Bodies of Extraction: Crip Ecologies and Otherness in Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicanx Narratives 
Emily Vazquez Enriquez- approved substitute for SPA 201

 

What does it mean to be human? Drawing on the fields of the environmental humanities, disability studies, indigenous studies, animal studies, crip theories, and posthumanism, this course examines cultural representations and lived experiences of the intimate and complex relationships between bodies, environments, and extractive systems. Central to our discussions will be the study of 20th and 21st century literary and artistic productions that portray some of the most recurrent ways in which human and nonhuman beings are affected by anthropocentric formulations. We will analyze the different systems of exclusion that are not only sustained but many times produced by mainstream definitions of the human. Because of it, we will attend to the legal, ethical, and affective dimensions of the most commonly accepted ontological categories. In our discussions we will rethink the boundaries established by the human/nonhuman binary. We will pay special attention to the gendered, ableist, and racial dynamics produced within the human-centered frames of extractive practices. Through the analysis of Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicanx cultural production, we will interrogate the role that the definition of the human has in an era marked by climate change, toxicity, and mass extinction. Among the authors we will study are Jorge Comensal, Isabel Zapata, and Helena Maria Viramontes. 

 

Spring 2022

SPA 224 - Studies of a Major Writer, Period, or Genre in Spanish Literature-Thenesoya V. Martín De la Nuez

Transoceanic Imaginaries and Hispanic Vulnerable Islands
This seminar aims to explore the relation between cultural production, geography, and the environment as a way to understand the complex role of islands and archipelagos in colonial and neo-colonial Hispanic transnational contexts. From an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective that overlaps Environmental Humanities, Postcolonial and Island Studies, and through a close reading of a heterogeneous corpus of literary texts and contemporary art interventions, films, documentary, literature, and photography, we will examine the impact of Spanish colonial desire in different islands and archipelagos across the Globe —African, Caribbean, Atlantic, Pacific, and Asian. Classes will invite to think about the role of artists and writers as activists (“artivists”), and the impact of climate change and colonial legacies on insular spaces. Topics such as transoceanic insular imaginaries, deforestation, sea-level rising, indigenous ecopoetics, displacement; and concepts such as slow violence, Anthropocene, smallness, archipelagic thinking, isolation and islandeness will be analyzed.

SPA 207 - History of the Spanish Language - Travis Bradley
Este seminario presenta un estudio de la variación lingüística en el español a través del tiempo. Se examinarán los principales cambios estructurales desde el periodo del latín hablado, provocados por el cambio natural de la lengua y por influencias externas, hasta dar con la lengua moderna. Se prestará especial atención al judeoespañol, conservado durante más de 500 años por los judíos sefardíes, expulsados de España en 1492. El judeoespañol servirá de "laboratorio diacrónico" que permite explorar tanto la estructura lingüística del español medieval como la naturaleza del cambio lingüístico en general. Esta visión diacrónica permite comprender mejor la estructura dialectal del mundo hispanohablante contemporáneo.

Required text:
Ralph J. Penny, 2014, Gramática histórica del español: Edición actualizada.

SPA 281 - Latin American Women Writers - Ana Peluffo- approved substitute for SPA 202

Feminismos, interseccionalidad y afectos en América Latina

Jueves 4:10-7:00 pm

Olson 144

Este seminario se plantea como una reflexión teórica sobre la producción cultural de escritoras, críticas, artistas y activistas políticas de América Latina desde un perspectiva sexo-afectiva. A partir de un archivo ecléctico de textos que van desde la época colonial hasta el presente trazaremos un recorrido cronológico por los principales debates que han tenido lugar en la esfera femenina en diversas regiones de América Latina.  En nuestras lecturas de lxs diversos feminismos prestaremos particular atención a la manera en que las productoras culturales interiorizan, subvierten o modifican los paradigmas afectivos dominantes propiciados por el heteropatriarcado así como también a los afectos que se movilizan en ellos para construir redes, espacios, corporalidades y genealogías transfronterizas. Entre los textos que estaremos leyendo figuran cartas, poemas, novelas, cuentos, obras visuales y textos críticos de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Grete Stern, Alfonsina Storni, Eva Illouz, Flora Tristán, Tamara Kamenszain, Rita Laura Segato, Gabriela Mistral, Silvina Ocampo, Audre Lorde, Sara Ahmed, Nancy Morejón, Sayak Valencia, Camila Sosa Villada y Mariana Enríquez entre otras.