Global Arc

What does it mean to be Latin American? Hispanic? Spanish? Peruvian? Latina/o/x? How are national and alternate identities constructed and why? How are ideas of belonging to the body politic defined in Spain, Latin America, and in Spanish-speaking communities in the United States from within and without? Our course will engage this question by surveying and analyzing literary, historical, and visual productions from the time of the foundation of the Spanish empire to the present time.

When the name of Miguel de Cervantes is mentioned, readers tend to think of the character Don Quijote -most often his idealism or madness. But far beyond that, the radically new work that is Don Quijote - along with several of Cervantes - other creations -offer unorthodox and challenging perspectives on race, ethnicity, gender, class, and human nature. His theater, his highly experimental Exemplary Stories, and the Persiles all offer Mediterranean dramas of exiles, slaves, captives, renegades and male and female protagonists in the confrontation of identity and the hegemonic categories of the Spanish empire.

What did it mean to be "wild," "manly" or "white" in Early Modernity, and how do these categories function today? This course explores films made in the last fifty years, featuring "descents into savagery" and the colonial texts that inspired them. Among other topics, we'll discuss: coloniality and its effects; primitivism and progress; media and mediation; race and gender; healing practices; intercultural dialogues; and community-based performances.

What did it mean to be "wild," "manly" or "white" in Early Modernity, and how do these categories function today? This course explores films made in the last fifty years, featuring "descents into savagery" and the colonial texts that inspired them. Among other topics, we'll discuss: coloniality and its effects; primitivism and progress; media and mediation; race and gender; healing practices; intercultural dialogues; and community-based performances.

This course focuses on the relationship between politics and culture in Spain today. We will study art, literature, culture and performances created by collectives, social movements and individuals involved in political activities. Feminism, ecology, racism, and social justice are among the topics to be considered. The course's main objective is to provide students with a set of strong conceptual, analytical and linguistic skills, which will be of great help in 300-level Spanish literature and culture courses. Final project is the creation of a fanzine.

Graffiti and rap music have become main cultural phenomena in the last decades, revealing the desires, fears and demands of city dwellers in the Luso-Hispanic worlds, where hip-hop's global spirit blends with local cultural traditions. In NYC, Madrid, D.F., Rio and Buenos Aires, urban cultures have expressed the transformations of cities in a globalized world, and struggles on the part of their populations. Taking the Iberian case as an axis, this course analyzes the Hispanic global expansion of hip-hop cultures from the artistic, historical, social and political angles.

This seminar grapples with the question of authorship and meaning in the literature of Jorge Luis Borges, the legendary Argentine writer whose convoluted fictions continue puzzling readers. Borges is a foundational figure. Gabriel García Márquez and Paul Auster, and philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, are all indebted to Borges. Using different perspectives, from philosophy and aesthetics to politics and cultural analysis, we will study Borges's thematic and formal obsessions: time and memory; labyrinths; reading as a form of writing; and the universality of Argentine local traditions such as tango and gaucho culture.

Children, women, the elderly, minorities, people with special conditions... Spanish culture is full of characters that represent subjects characterized as weak, helpless or subalterns. This course is an introduction to modern and contemporary Spain through the representations of these groups and the alternative social and cultural landscapes that they shape. Drawing on some basic ideas of feminism, decolonialism, queer theory, or environmentalism, we will analyze literary texts, films, comics and other genres to explore how and why vulnerability has become a central concept in the present.

After the COVID crisis, illness, contagion and healing became central figures of a new global reality. This course will provide a collective space for conversation and analysis in Spanish to help navigate the anxieties that the new virus brought to our lives and societies. We will discuss sickness, infection, immunity and epidemics from a historical, political and cultural perspective using media, literary texts and films.

This is an introductory course to modern culture in Spain that will address its main topics through texts produced by relevant authors, belonging to different artistic trends, from 1700 to 2020. It will devote special attention to subjects such as the configuration of Nation-State ideologies; the politics of language and public, cultural and literary discourse, which deeply determines social life at many levels; and the political, cultural and countercultural role of bodies (both individual and collective) by their actions in the social and public spaces, from a gender studies and feminist perspective.