Global Arc

This seminar explores darkening technologies in contemporary Latin America as the main tools of a new poetics that strongly challenges vision and its alleged ability to "clearly" generate knowledge. We will explore a variety of artifacts that discard the eyes in favor of experiences of blindness, obscured vision, and tactile sensation that interrogate the visual imperative. I propose that opacity, darkness, and blindness are poetic mechanisms that can stand up to the authoritarian regime of vision and question the insidious ways in which light suffuses peripheral knowledge, politics, and bodies.

This course is designed to serve as an advanced introduction to the study of contemporary Spain. It will provide students with methodological, analytic and bibliographical tools to conduct academic research in topics related to post-1898 Spain, such as colonialism, dictatorship, memory, violence, war, diaspora and exile, democracy, social struggles and cultural movements.

This seminar relates Caribbean music to historical and contemporary migratory issues. It examines questions of listening, memory, joy, diaspora, and the Anthropocene through genres like: son, bolero, calypso, salsa, reggae, merengue, bomba, and reggaeton. Attention to gender, sexual and racial inequities in portrayals of migrant cultures as symbolic of multiculturalism, while migrants are stigmatized as risks to security. Seminar speaks to current global context of displacement with focus on climate change's impact on the Caribbean. We study music, sound, performance, literary, ethnographic and historical texts, visual arts, and journalism.

This course, open to both undergraduate and graduate students, explores Cervantes' highly experimental fiction. Known as the author of the immensely innovative 'Don Quijote', Cervantes is credited with writing the first modern European novel, with a daring exploration of human madness, a satire of New World conquistadors, the Inquisition and more. Yet he is equally bold and experimental in his daring short stories, the `Novelas ejemplares', and the work that he was certain would be his legacy, the 'Persiles'. In this class we will consider Cervantes' rethinking of cultural models in his articulation of the modern human subject.

This course will reflect on 'childhood' as a cultural topic that involves aesthetics, politics, and philosophy in Spain and Western culture. From the Enlightenment to the present day, different definitions of infancy will be explored using art, literature and theory. Some of the themes covered will be relationships between early life and capitalism, children and minorities, art and toys, games and power, kids and revolutions, schools and prisons.

The Prado Museum is a central institution, not only for the Spanish art and culture, but the nation-building processes and cultural narratives operating in Spanish Modernity. Using different sources (paintings, literature, documentary films, audiovisual resources, essays), this course will offer a multi-perspective to one of the most important art institutions worldwide. Topics such as class wars, nature, gender, colonialism, historical memory and democracy in relation to art, exhibitions and audiences will offer an overview of Spanish cultural history from 1819 to the present day.

Does the coronavirus emergency irretrievably change our way to see and act in the society? Is the way we experience this crisis completely new, or does it have any link with our past experiences? In this course we will explore different cultural responses to the COVID-19 pandemic (and its likely traditions), such as the use of apocalyptic imagery to represent the crisis, the recurrence of technocratic considerations around the "govern of the experts," conspiracy discourses that reproduce dystopic readings of the world, and diverse creative paths to contest deterministic interpretation of the post-pandemic future.

This seminar interrogates the cinema of the internationally acclaimed Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. We will address Almodóvar as a global brand and auteur who compulsively cites, recycles, and reenacts the most prestigious names and works of film history. The seminar will discuss the politics and aesthetics of Almodóvar, with special consideration of intermediality, spectatorship, gender and sexuality, and the ways the brand positions itself in a dramatically changing industry. We will review the entire Almodóvar universe, including its production company; its revision of the star system; and relationship to Spain's memory politics.