Global Arc

This course explores the vast linguistic diversity of the Americas: native languages, pidgins, creoles, mixed languages, and other languages in North, Central, and South America, including the Caribbean. We will examine historical and current issues of multilingualism to understand the relationship between language, identity, and social mobility. We will discuss how languages played a central role in colonization and nation-building processes, and how language policies contribute to linguistic loss and revitalization. This course has no prerequisites and is intended for students interested in learning more about languages in the Americas.

From animal and human interactions, to social hierarchies, fantasies, controversies over zoos, natural habitats, and slaughterhouses, this course will give us a platform to discuss some of the most timely topics of our day. We will consider some theoretical perspectives on animal-human relationships as we read and discuss works by such authors as Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Quiroga, Monterroso, Rulfo, Borges, Cervantes, Lorca, Delibes, Clarín, Hidalgo and Atxaga.

Flotsam. Jetsam. Hunger. Nudity. Lone survivors washed ashore. What can tales of shipwreck tell us about the cultures, societies and technologies that produce them? We read narratives and watch films of disaster and survival from the sixteenth century to the present, with an eye to how these texts can challenge or reinforce the myths that empires and nation-states tell about themselves and others.

From Argentina to Mexico, Chile to Ecuador, women writers and artists from across Latin America are enjoying growing acclaim after years of marginalization. Their path-breaking work has brought to the fore new themes and perspectives, embracing both experimental and documentary poetics. Through a series of short texts, films, theater, and visual artifacts, this course offers an introduction to Latin American women's remarkable literary and artistic contributions in the 20th and 21st centuries.

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.