Global Arc

An advanced course in Spanish composition and conversation designed to give students increased fluency and expertise in written and verbal Spanish skills. Extensive review of grammar and vocabulary through written and oral exercises. Course material includes literary texts, news-related publications, and films. Three classes. Prerequisite: SPA 107 or SPA 108 or equivalent AP/SAT score.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An introduction to 20th century Spanish modern art, this course will study modern artistic languages such as literature, painting, sculpture, film, photography, theatre, music and dance in their historical contexts. It will examine relations between artistic styles and contemporary Iberian history. The course's main objective is to provide students with a set of strong aesthetic, analytical, and linguistic skills, which will provide a great asset in studying 300-level literature and culture courses.

Since 2018 the feminist movement has massively and transnationally re-emerged. Particularly in the Spanish-speaking world, the enormous momentum of its struggle has generated profound political, social, and cultural transformations. In this course we will study the so-called 4th Feminist Wave from a varied number of media (literature, film, social media, archives, etc.) created by artists, intellectuals, and activists from the Spanish-speaking world. The aim of the course is to promote a rigorous knowledge of the recent history of feminism in The Americas and Europe and to encourage reflection on the relevance of its claims and achievements

Anthropologist Sidney Mintz famously explored connections between sugar, capitalism, and modern global history. This course borrows his approach to explore the ways that sugar - with reference to other commodities such as coffee and petroleum - have shaped societies in the Caribbean and Latin America (and, less obviously, Europe, Africa, and Asia). Through short stories, poems, archival documents, essays, novels, films, and art about sugar and its worlds, students will study histories of enslavement and marronage, environmental history, Cold War tensions, modernization, and major literary, filmic and artistic movements.