Global Arc

This course introduces students to the politics of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It starts with an overview of pre-communist and communist trajectories. We then discuss the initial regime changes, which ranged from rapid democratization in East-Central Europe to authoritarian persistence in much of the former Soviet Union and the Balkans. Next we cover the role of subsequent revolutions (including in Ukraine) and European integration incentives in driving later democratization efforts, and the more recent authoritarian backsliding among some former Soviet Republics (especially Russia) and in EU members (such as Hungary).

Donald Trump's first and second presidencies have ushered in a host of debates about familiar and less familiar features of the U.S. Constitution. A political outsider and populist, President Trump has pushed on inherited constitutional practices and assumptions. In an era of highly polarized politics, his opponents have likewise made innovative use of constitutional institutions and powers. The Trump presidency has generated unusual concerns about the stability and robustness of the American constitutional system. This course will try to make sense of those concerns and the constitutional debates prompted by Trump's first and second terms.

This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of oral history. Students will learn the principles and applications of oral history. The class will collaborate with the Historical Society of Princeton and the Princeton Public Library to develop the first stage of the "Voces de la Diáspora" Oral History project, a project partner of "Voices of Princeton". Discussion on readings will be combined with hands-on activities to prepare students for conducting oral history interviews in Spanish.

The world we inhabit is flooded with images. They shape our perception of the past, the present, and the future. And they also serve as a vehicle of power and resistance. But how do images actually work? Who gives them meaning(s), and why? Our course will look at these questions through the lens of the rich visual culture of the Hispanic world, from the rise of the Spanish empire through the early twentieth century. From Velázquez's Las Meninas to the Virgin of Guadalupe in Tepeyac, we will learn how to place pivotal images in their historical contexts, discussing them as both witnesses, and agents, of social change and artistic innovation.

The focus of this course is on learning how to read, transcribe, translate, and interpret by-and-large handwritten documents that concern the Spanish Crown's conquest, presence, and aspirations in the Spanish Transpacific, mainly in the Philippines from 1521 to about 1800. Most of the manuscripts we will examine were produced by European colonizers, missionaries, and their allies, but even many of those cases we will learn to detect the voices of the subjected and colonized.

This undergraduate seminar seeks to examine social and cultural resistance to the Franco regime in the first twenty five years of its existence. The period that we will cover is 1939- el año de la victoria- through 1964- the year in which the Franco Regime celebrated its "XXV Años de Paz."Through the lens of lo social we will examine diverse cultural production, including poems, novels, films, and theatrical productions, that question both the discourse of peace proffered by the dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco and the common assertion that only a cultural desert existed in postwar Spain.

How do images communicate the pain of others? What made art so troubling that led people to attack it, and to try to regulate it? This course explores the connections between art and violence in Spain and its empire during the early modern period, a period of globalization, religious conflict, and cross-cultural encounter. We will interrogate how did representations of war, martyrdom, and sexual violence affect their viewers and shape their ideologies, and explore the dangerous power of images by focusing on phenomena such as censorship, iconoclasm, and racism.

From its humble beginnings in the Iberian Peninsula to its multiple contemporary manifestations and global reach, Spanish is a rowdy, vibrant, multiethnic, polyphonic language, constantly changed by evolution and innovation. When did Castilian become Spanish? How did the language contribute to nation building and imperial expansion? Who decides what correct Spanish is? Does Spanish need to be protected? Can it be improved? Through the study of texts that foreground Spanish across time and place, we explore the historical forces that have shaped Spanish and current debates about the state of one of the world's most widely spoken languages.

This course discusses commonly held beliefs about the Conquest and the colonial past, as well as the persistence of these ideas in the present. Classes will survey a diversity of colonial literary, historical, and visual artifacts, around which we will anchor our discussions. We will introduce critical perspectives on the Spanish and Portuguese conquests and the ensuing colonial processes, from the Latin American and Caribbean postcolonial and decolonial fields. The course's main goal is to develop incisive questions and to productivey challenge our own modern/colonial epistemological frameworks in relation with these ideas and imaginaries.

This class will combine the study of modern and contemporary Spanish poetry with creative writing exercises. It will explore the links between poetic expressions and social, cultural, and political trends in which they arise. It will deal with various conceptions and performances of poetics, from avant-garde experimentalism to popular music, from hip-hop to poetic public interventions.