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SPAN B000 Spanish TA/Drill Sessions

Fall 2025

TA/Drill sessions for Spanish courses.

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SPAN B001 Beginning Spanish I

Fall 2025

Develops basic communicative skills in both oral and written Spanish. Introduces students to different aspects of Hispanic and Latino cultures. Assumes no previous study of Spanish. The Tuesday class is a mandatory practice session with a teaching assistant.

Course does not meet an Approach

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SPAN B002 Beginning Spanish II

Spring 2026

Second course of the First-year Spanish language sequence. Designed to develop basic communicative skills in both oral and written Spanish. Students are exposed to different aspects of Hispanic and Latino cultures. The Tuesday class is a mandatory practice session with a teaching assistant. Students who receive a 3.3 or above in this course may enroll in SPAN 101 the following semester. Students who receive a 3.0 or less must take SPAN 100. Prerequisite: SPAN B001 or placement.

Course does not meet an Approach

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SPAN B100 Basic Intermediate Spanish

Fall 2025

A review of grammar with emphasis on all language skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing, with group activities and individual presentations. A variety of readings from the Hispanic world will be included. The course meets for five 50-minute sessions per week: three with the instructor, one with a TA on Monday evenings, and one mandatory study group session. Prerequisite: SPAN 002 or placement or instructor's permission.

Course does not meet an Approach

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SPAN B101 Intermediate Spanish

Fall 2025, Spring 2026

This course focuses on developing vocabulary and grammatical structures in all language skills in Spanish. A variety of readings from the Hispanic world will be included. The class meets three times a week with the instructor and there is one additional required 50-minute practice session with a teaching assistant on Monday evenings.

Course does not meet an Approach

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SPAN B102 Advanced Language Through Culture

Fall 2025, Spring 2026

This course stresses mastery of complex grammatical constructions through selected readings from the Spanish-speaking world in a global context: art, folklore, geography, literature, sociopolitical issues, and multicultural perspectives. Written and oral proficiency is emphasized, with special emphasis on reading and writing. The class meets three hours a week with the instructor and there is an additional required 50-minute practice session with a teaching assistant on Monday evenings. Prerequisite: SPAN 101 or placement or instructor's permission.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

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SPAN B120 Introducción al análisis literario

Fall 2025, Spring 2026

Readings from Spanish and Spanish-American works of various periods and genres (drama, poetry, short stories). Main focus on developing analytical skills with attention to improvement of grammar. This course is a requisite for the Spanish major. Prerequisite: SPAN 102, or placement. This course can satisfy the Writing Intensive (WI) requirement for the Spanish major. Critical Interpretation (CI). Counts toward Latin American, Iberian and Latina/o Studies.

Writing Intensive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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SPAN B205 Escritoras en la España contemporánea

Spring 2026

The course will focus on fiction written during the 20th and 21st century by women writers in Spain. We will study how the female subject is represented and constructed in these texts along historical events that have changed the country. Taking into account the political and social paradigms that dominate Spanish modern history and culture, we will explore how twentieth and twenty-first-century women writers negotiate the female subject in relation to earlier models of narration, identities (both self and regional), and social relationships. We will also look how these models have been challenged by a new wave of immigration and how it affects the social landscape of Spain. We will bring into the analysis and discussion of literary texts some of the issues addressed by feminist literary theory, such as language, canon formation, gender, and class. Finally, we will pay attention to the recovery of the country's feminist tradition, as well as current topics of social and political conflict that concern women in Spain.

Writing Intensive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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SPAN B229 Los mitos coloniales, de la conquista al cine de hoy

Not offered 2025-26

The early writings of the New World straddle between history and fantasy, fact and legend. This period is particularly rich in chronicles that made no distinction between real and imaginary places and creatures, at a time when ambitious colonial enterprises were guided by myths (finding El Dorado, the Fountain of Youth, Paradise.) In this course, we will examine the fantasies of imperial imagination that have persisted to this day by looking at both early chronicles and recent films. From Columbus' writings (1492) to the Avatar saga, this course will explore the reverberations between those colonial texts and our own views of history, which may not be less mythical, or less colonial. Course taught in Spanish. Prerequisite: SPAN B120; or SPAN 200-level course or placement.

Writing Attentive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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SPAN B232 Encuentros culturales en América Latina

Fall 2025

This course introduces canonical Latin American texts through translation scenes represented in them. Arranged chronologically since the first encounters during the conquest until contemporary times, the readings trace different modulations of a constant linguistic and cultural preoccupation with translation in Latin America. Translation scenes are analyzed through close reading, and then considered as barometers for understanding the broader cultural climate. Special emphasis is placed on key notions for literary analysis and translation studies, as well as for linking the literary text with cultural, social, political, and historical processes. Prerequisite: SPAN B120 or another SPAN 200-level course.

Writing Attentive

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: International Studies; International Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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SPAN B243 Temas de la literatura hispana

Section 001 (Fall 2025): La España picaresca
Section 001 (Fall 2026): La España picaresca

Fall 2025

This is a topic course. Topics vary. Prerequisite: SPAN B120; or another 200-level.

Current topic description: With wit, a bit of trickery, and biting social criticism, Spain's pícaros (rogue tricksters) narrate the harsh realities of an empire in decline. This course follows these notorious antiheroes through the grit and grime of 16th and 17th-century Iberian cities, critically engaging the picaresque genre as a tool for satirizing societal hypocrisy and exposing the decay festering behind Spain's imperial grandeur. Juxtaposing texts such as Lazarillo de Tormes and El buscón with La pícara Justina and La niña de los embustes,Teresa de Manzanares, students will interrogate how class, gender, and survival intersect in the lives of marginalized figures criminalized by society. Through satire, autobiography, and subversive storytelling, the course invites students to sharpen their critical voice in stripping back the gilded surface of the so-called "Golden Age."

Writing Intensive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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SPAN B252 Compassion, Indignation, and Anxiety in Latin American Film

Spring 2026

Stereotypically, Latin Americans are viewed as "emotional people"--often a euphemism to mean irrational, impulsive, wildly heroic, fickle. This course takes this expression at face value to ask: Are there particular emotions that identify Latin Americans? And, conversely, do these "people" become such because they share certain emotions? Can we find a correlation between emotions and political trajectories? To answer these questions, we will explore three types of films that seem to have, at different times, taken hold of the Latin American imagination and feelings: melodramas (1950s-1960s), documentaries (1970s-1990s), and "low-key" comedies (since 2000s.) This course is offered in both Spanish and English. Prerequisite: SPAN 120 or permission of instructor

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Film Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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AFST B206 Black Latinx Americas: Movements, Politics, & Cultures

Spring 2026

This interdisciplinary course examines the extensive and diverse histories, social movements, political mobilization and cultures of Black people (Afrodescendientes) in Latin America and the Caribbean. While the course will begin in the slavery era, most of our scholarly-activist attention will focus on the histories of peoples of African descent in Latin America after emancipation to the present. Some topics we will explore include: the particularities of slavery in the Americas, the Haitian Revolution and its impact on articulations of race and nation in the region, debates on "racial democracy," the relationship between gender, class, race, and empire, and recent attempts to write Afro-Latin American histories from "transnational" and "diaspora" perspectives. We will engage the works of historians, activists, artists, anthropologists, sociologists, and political theorists who have been key contributors to the rich knowledge production on Black Latin America.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; General Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx; Museum Studies; Spanish.

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COML B213 Theory in Practice: Critical Discourses in the Humanities

Spring 2026

What is a postcolonial subject, a queer gaze, a feminist manifesto? And how can we use (as readers of texts, art, and films) contemporary studies on animals and cyborgs, object-oriented ontology, zombies, storyworlds, neuroaesthetics? By bringing together the study of major theoretical currents of the 20th century and the practice of analyzing literary works in the light of theory, this course aims at providing students with skills to use literary theory in their own scholarship. The selection of theoretical readings reflects the history of theory (psychoanalysis, structuralism, narratology), as well as the currents most relevant to the contemporary academic field: Post-structuralism, Post-colonialism, Gender Studies, and Ecocriticism. They are paired with a diverse range of short stories across multiple language traditions (Poe, Kafka, Camus, Borges, Calvino, Morrison, Djebar, Murakami, Ngozi Adichie) that we discuss along with our study of theoretical texts. We will discuss how to apply theory to the practice of interpretation and of academic writing, and how theoretical ideas shape what we are reading. The class will be conducted in English, with an additional hour taught by the instructor of record in the target language for students wishing to take the course for language credit.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Africana Studies; East Asian Languages & Culture; English; French and Francophone Studies; Gender & Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; German and German Studies; History of Art; Italian and Italian Studies; Philosophy; Russian; Spanish.

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ENGL B193 Latinx Monsters

Fall 2025

Latinx culture is filled with folktale figures to scare misbehaving children, from la llorona and la ciguapa to el cucuy and el chupacabras. At the same time, Latina/o/x/e authors and artists often mobilize monsters and images of monstrosity to symbolically interrogate different kinds of oppression, exploitation, and other-ing. This course focuses on monsters and the monstrous to ask, Who and what are the monsters? And what can we learn from the violence associated with monstrosity? We will examine folklore creatures, ghostly hauntings, witches, vampires, werewolves and others with magical abilities to explore how they simultaneously embody histories of intergenerational trauma and imagine alternative ways of knowing and being. We will analyze a range of Latinx literary and cultural production from short stories and novels to graphic narratives, as well as film and visual art. In doing so, we will develop a deeper appreciation for the critical potential of monsters in Latinx culture. Since this is a 100-level course, sustained attention will be placed on developing close-reading and essay writing skills.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Latin American Iberian Latinx; Spanish.

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ENGL B217 Narratives of Latinidad

Fall 2025

This course explores how Latina/o writers fashion bicultural and transnational identities and narrate the intertwined histories of the U.S. and Latin America. We will focus on topics of shared concern among Latino groups such as struggles for social justice, the damaging effects of machismo and racial hierarchies, the politics of Spanglish, and the affective experience of migration. By analyzing a range of cultural production, including novels, poetry, testimonial narratives, films, activist art, and essays, we will unpack the complexity of Latinidad in the Americas.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Comparative Literature; Gender Sexuality Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx; Praxis Program; Spanish.

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ENGL B237 Cultural Memory and State-Sanctioned Violence in Latinx Literature

Spring 2026

This course examines how Latinx literature grapples with state-sanctioned violence, cultural memory, and struggles for justice in the Americas. Attending to the histories of dictatorship and civil war in Central and South America, we will focus on a range of genres-including novels, memoir, poetry, film, and murals-to explore how memory and the imagination can contest state-sanctioned violence, how torture and disappearances haunt the present, how hetereopatriarchal and white supremacist discourses are embedded in authoritarian regimes, and how U.S. imperialism has impacted undocumented migration. Throughout the course we will analyze the various creative techniques Latinx cultural producers use to resist violence and imagine justice.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Comparative Literature; Gender Sexuality Studies; International Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx; Spanish.

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GNST B245 Introduction to Latin American, Iberian and Latina/o Studies

Spring 2026

A broad, interdisciplinary survey of themes uniting and dividing societies from the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas. The class introduces the methods and interests of all departments in the concentration, posing problems of cultural continuity and change, globalization and struggles within dynamic histories, political economies, and creative expressions. Course is taught in English.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities; International Studies; International Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx; Spanish.

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POLS B237 Latin American Politics

Spring 2026

This course examines Latin American politics through the lens of authoritarianism and populism. Since the mid-twentieth century, the region has undergone sweeping political transformations, including a shift from military rule to electoral politics. Despite these changes, democratic instability remains a persistent challenge. Students will analyze key historical and contemporary political moments to understand how colonial legacies, Eurocentrism, religion, patriarchal systems, and neoliberal economic policies have shaped-and often undermined-democratic goals. By the end of the semester, students will have a nuanced understanding of the region's political dynamics from the early 1950s to the present. Prerequisite: One course in Political Science or Latin American Studies

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Latin American Iberian Latinx; Spanish.

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