Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

The Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese Literature Division offers two tracks: Spanish and Spanish American literature. The main objective of this division is to train students diachronically in their fields, providing them with an exceptional theoretical background and thoroughly preparing them for their future academic and scholarly careers.

With a view towards interdisciplinarity, our course offerings include various disciplines and time-periods and cover philosophy, literary theory, Golden Age prose and theatre, the Enlightenment, Romanticism/Symbolism/Decadentism, Realism, Generation of 1898/1927, contemporary Spanish poetry and novel, colonial literature, Afro-Caribbean literature, Modernismo, contemporary Latin American prose, poetry, and theatre, as well as contemporary film and art. Our students are also encouraged to take classes in the Comparative Literature, English, or French departments to further enhance their academic preparation.

With twenty-two professional faculty and more than fifty graduate students (about half at the doctoral level), our department is committed to maintaining a low student-to-faculty ratio. Our graduate students teach three basic Spanish courses per academic year, and selected and qualified students are frequently offered to teach culture, literature, or linguistics courses not only in Spanish, but also in Italian and Portuguese. The intellectual environment of the Department is regularly enhanced with guest lectures, colloquia, conferences, and institutes. In the last few years, authors such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Memp Giardinelli, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Rosa Montero, Antonio Muñóz Molina, and Ana Lydia Vega, read their work and presented lectures in our department.

Research and Activities

Our graduate students are afforded several professional development opportunities through the Department in areas such as teaching (creating and implementing courses), research (fellowships and grants), study/research abroad (for dissertation), and course supervision (for both the Basic Language Program and intermediate and advanced undergraduate Spanish courses). Students may also gain valuable research experience by working closely with faculty members as research assistants. Additionally, the graduate student journal Aleph, the annual graduate Coloquio Iberoamericano, and the professional journal Hispanic Linguistics, all housed and organized in the Department, provide students with the opportunity to explore a variety of editorial and scholarly opportunities.

The Department and the Graduate School enthusiastically support the presentation of graduate research papers in national and international conferences, and they also offer competitive scholarships for dissertation writing. In the Spanish American area students have written outstanding dissertations on authors such as Borges, García Márquez, Palés Matos, and Valenzuela, and on topics as diverse as science fiction, postmodern detective fiction, paranoia and narrative, the ethics of authorship, and the presence of Scandinavian themes in Latin American poetry. In the Spanish division graduate students have forged new avenues of investigation in authors like Vercantes, Lope de Vega, Laforet, and Marías, and have proposed new critical approaches to the study of autobiography in women writers, Catalan nationalism, the role of memory in writing, and the intertextuality of fiction.

As for study abroad, graduate students can also participate in an academic year exchange program in Spain, either at the University of Salamanca or the University of Valladolid. Furthermore, graduate students have several opportunities to work in the Study Abroad Program in Salamanca and in the Summer Education Abroad Program in Puebla, Mexico.  

Research Facilities

The University Libraries comprise a central collection and seven branch libraries at the University Park campus, and libraries at twenty-two other Penn State locations. At University Park, Pattee Library houses the Arts and Humanities Library, with extensive holdings in literature and linguistics, the Extended Hours Reading Room, featuring Reserves and Microforms, and the Gateway Commons, featuring electronic resources. State-of-the-art multimedia and research facilities are also available at the Center for Language Acquisition.

Admission Requirements

Applicants must hold a baccalaureate degree (BA) from an accredited institution. Students applying for graduate study in Spanish should have the equivalent of an undergraduate Spanish major. The GRE is required of applicants educated in the continental United States. The TOEFL (minimum score 550 for the paper version, 213 for the computer version) is required of all international students for whom English is not a first language, or who do not hold a baccalaureate or master's degree from an institution whose language of instruction is English.

Students entering with a master's degree should contact the department for specific requirements. For more information on Admissions please visit the Admission Requirements page for MA/PhD program.

Financial Assitance

Most graduate students in the Department hold teaching assistantships, for which they receive a stipend and a grant-in-aid which covers full University tuition. For those who do not, there are several sources of financial aid in the form of grants, fellowships, scholarships, etc. Applications for teaching assistantships should be made directly to the head of the department before January 15 for the following academic year. Students interested in being considered for fellowship support should apply no later than January 15.