Global Arc

An intensive, four-week advanced course in Spanish composition and conversation taught in Toledo, Spain. Its main purpose is to increase the student's fluency and accuracy in spoken and written Spanish. Importance is also given to understanding elements of Spanish literature and culture through literary texts, Spanish audiovisual resources, and films.

An intensive, six week immersion course in Spanish and Argentine culture and history. This course is designed for students who have completed the Spanish language requirement and wish to improve their fluency and accuracy in spoken and written Spanish. By examining the political, cultural, and artistic history of Buenos Aires, the course also seeks to enable the students to understand and interpret Argentine culture and politics through literature, film, tango music, theater, photography, architecture and graffiti.

SPA 208 is an intensive, five-week full immersion course in Spanish language, and Argentine history, culture, and art. This course is designed for students who have completed their Spanish language requirement and wish to strengthen their proficiency in spoken and written Spanish in a Latin American country. The course also seeks to enable students to understand and interpret Argentine history and rich culture, through the exploration of the city of Buenos Aires, its architecture, museums, and cultural life; and the analysis of television and print media.

Designed to enhance oral and written skills in Spanish while increasing familiarity with Hispanic cultures through cinema. Language skills development is connected to the content of films and will be combined with in-class debates on cultural topics and writing of compositions. Two 90-minute classes. Prerequisite: SPA 107 or SPA 108 or equivalent AP/SAT score.

This course offers an introduction to translation practice for the Spanish-English language pair, focusing primarily on the task of translating from Spanish into English. However, students will also carry out a number of brief English into Spanish translation tasks. The course is conducted entirely in Spanish and follows a communicative approach to translation, with a good balance between theory and praxis. It will provide students with a solid foundation in the field, and prepare them to take more specialized translation courses.

Offered as an overview of sociolinguistic variation in the Spanish-speaking world, students will learn about social, political, and cultural aspects related to dialectal variation in Spanish and become acquainted with important linguistic features present in various dialects. Upon completion of the course, students become familiarized with particular features distinguishing one dialect from another, while gaining knowledge of the development of these differences. This course will greatly enrich a student's view of Spanish, either as a native/heritage speaker or Spanish learner, and allows for the development of analytical skills.

This course surveys the practice of beliefs in Spain, Latin America, and in Hispanic communities in the United States. It explores how "Catholic" folk piety was established and developed in Spain and what happened to it when it transferred to the New World. By surveying the diverse configurations of religious practices through written texts and visual media, it inquires how identity and social relationships define a person's relation to the divine. Emphasis will be given to the development of spoken and written proficiency in Spanish.

Love is the subject of the world's greatest stories. The passions aroused by Helen of Troy brought down a city and made Homer's masterpiece possible, while the foolishness of those in love inspired Shakespeare and Cervantes to create their most memorable characters. Many powerful Latin American and Spanish stories deal with the force and effects of love. In this course, we will study a group of films and literary fictions that focus on different kinds and forms of love. We will pay special attention to the forms of narrative love (quest, courting, adultery, heartbreaking), as well as the translation of love into language, body, and image.

From Artemidorus in antiquity to Freud in modern times, dreams and nightmares have been a perennial human concern. This course will explore political, philosophical, medical and psycho-sexual representations of dreams and nightmares by such authors as Cervantes, Zayas, Calderón, Cela, Martín Gaite, Muñoz Molina, Bolaño, Piglia and Vargas Llosa.

How do we represent meaning to ourselves and to others in contexts of difference? What social and historical conceptions of language are operational in our scriptural practices and cultures of scholarship? Because texts are embedded in, and shaped by, communities with shared histories and social practices, by experiencing different ways of reading and writing, we can explore not only new words, but new worlds. This course offers substantial practice to help students write creatively and credibly in Spanish, using the writing process recursively to present their ideas in an articulate, sophisticated manner.