Graduate Courses

The aim of this course is to provide students with the skills necessary to contribute to our understanding of modern generative syntactic theory (although other theories may be introduced by professors from different theoretical backgrounds). An overview of the theory of early generative grammar and its attendant problems will be presented in this course. Attempts to resolve these issues in contemporary syntax via the minimalist program will be covered in as much depth as possible. Using the skills and arguments developed in this course, students will be required to do original research on a particular problem of syntax.

The goal of this course is to engage graduate students in an analysis of the competing theories of the methods for classifying the world's languages. The course will provide an historical overview of the field with a major emphasis on contemporary debates. At issue will be whether all languages can be reconstructed to a common source. Is there possible evidence for such a reconstruction? Can the methodology faithfully extend to the very remote past?

Students in this course will examine the shift from rule-based to constraint-based theories of phonology with an emphasis on analyzing the shortcomings and paradoxes inherent in earlier approaches. At issue will be the search for a better understanding of how the phonological component continually interacts with phonetics and morphology in order to create optimal outputs. Students will analyze particular problems through reading various journal articles treating the same topic from different approaches. They will then evaluate the various approaches systematically. The goal of this course is to prepare students to do close readings of advanced research.

This course provides a cross-disciplinary overview of language science approaches to bilingualism and second language learning.

This course will address professional development with attention to the unique nature of cross-disciplinary research. In addition, we will focus on the writing of journal articles and grant proposals, demystifying the grant and journal review process, acquiring skill in formal presentations at national and international conferences, the job market in the academy and industry, developing collaborations here and abroad, and learning to mentor undergraduate research students. The seminar will also provide training in the responsible conduct of research in a broader range of research settings than typically encountered within disciplinary graduate programs. Ethical conduct will form an integral part of students' research experiences as they work in research groups and laboratories here and abroad. The proseminar will address emerging issues such as security of digital data, as well as issues relevant for the component disciplines involved (e.g., recruitment of college students enrolled in foreign language courses; working with populations with communication disorders; ethical oversight of international collaborations).

Audio-lingual orientation.

Course objectives are to understand cross-linguistic tendencies in language change, gain familiarity with some of the more-studied phenomena of the diachrony of Spanish, and conduct analysis of a linguistic variable in data from historical texts or from a (community-based speech) corpus.

This course offers foundations of generative syntax. It addresses the advantage of a scientific model to explain human knowledge of language that also makes predictions about its representation in the mind.

Students will (1) become acquainted with the study of grammatical constructions and the cognitive and interactional processes that shape them, in their social context; (2) sample approaches in this area, including usage-based theory, grammaticalization, typology, construction grammar, interactional linguistics; and (3) drawing on the methods of linguistic variation analysis, gain practical skills for carrying out a quantitative morphosyntactic analysis of appropriate (speech) data. Students will learn to distill findings into suitable format for scholarly venues and, by the end of the course, should have a paper to submit as a conference abstract and develop for journal submission.

This is a second graduate course in phonology, with a primary focus on Spanish. Our goals will be to understand the Spanish sound system in the context of phonological theory more generally, and to engage the field by generating and pursuing research questions that have the potential to contribute to advancing our knowledge of this topic. Our goals are both methodological and theoretical. Students will conduct focused explorations of the literature, generate research questions that build on our current knowledge, and develop strategies for answering those questions. Familiarity with the basic concepts of phonology, and with the major schools of thought in phonology (from LING 504) will be assumed.

An in-depth analysis of current research carried out on the acquisition of Spanish as a second language. Focus will be on syntax, phonology, lexicon, discourse, and pragmatics. Specific topics covered include the following: null-subjects, clitics; movement and word order, tense and aspect, mood, agreement features, grammaticalization, modality, negation, functional categories, tutored vs. untutored learners, UG vs. non-UG effects, the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy, markedness, cohesive devices, speech acts, metaphors, idioms, the lexicon and culture, the phonological systems, including suprasegmentals. In addition to developing an understanding of the current research on the acquisition of Spanish as a second language, students will learn how to read the research literature from a critical perspective and how to read empirical data presented in published research that might result in alternative interpretations from those espoused by authors of published work. This goal will be achieved in two ways: requiring students to submit via e-mail to the professor and other students in the seminar two- to three-page critiques of assigned readings; and oral presentations in class of readings selected by the student(s). Some of the critical reports and presentations will be carried out jointly, and others will be done individually. Students will also learn how to design and implement empirical research on the acquisition of Spanish as well as how to write up the results of this research in a potentially publishable research report. Finally, they will have the opportunity to present their research findings to the Penn State applied linguistics community, in a mini in-house workshop at the end of the course. In preparation for this, time will be set aside near the end of the seminar for students to present and discuss their research with their colleagues in the course. Most of the readings for the course will be preselected by the professor; however, students will also be expected to carry out independent reading of publications not included in the course syllabus and present and critique what they read in the seminar.

Early fragmentation among the peninsular dialects; their status today, Judeo-Spanish; descriptive analysis of modern Spanish American dialects.

Prose and poetry of major authors: works and trends of the late Golden Age and Baroque period.

Major works of Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderon, and others.

This seminar will examine the cinematic imagination of Spain's most internationally celebrated filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar. Topics to be considered will include Almodóvar's lensing of gender politics, sexuality, multiculturalism, and national identity in post-dictatorial Spain; his nimble negotiation of the local and the global; his taste for cinephilic self-referentiality and hybridity of genre; and a distinctive tendency toward thematic idiosyncrasy all of which are signature features of his postmodern 'brand.' Significant attention will be devoted to approaches and trends within the vast corpus of scholarly criticism dealing with the filmmaker's oeuvre, and our engagement with film theory will arise organically out of the references from these texts. Some basic tools, techniques, and language of film analysis will be considered, as will a general understanding of field-specific norms of film studies as practiced in North American and U.K. Hispanism.

Various currents in Spanish poetry from the generation of 1927: Lorca, Aleixandre, Salinas, Guillen, Alonso, Alberti, Hernandez, Otero, and others.

Content varies; selected topics from colonial period, romanticism, and the nineteenth century before modernism.

A foundation in the field and strategies for teaching Latina/o Studies to undergraduates. This course provides a foundation in U.S. Latina/o Studies Literature and its contexts, with two separate but related goals. The first is to get a grasp on the U.S. Latina/o Studies canon that integrates humanities and social science approaches in order to analyze critical historical contexts that have shaped the emergence and evolution of the field of Latina/o Studies in U.S. higher education and academia, such as early colonial enterprises in the South and the Southwest, Spanish and U.S. imperialism, the Chicano and Young Lords movements during the 1960s, immigration patterns from the Caribbean and Latin America, government policies towards Latinos, contemporary rural and urban movements, etc. The second goal is to explore systematically pedagogical theories and practices in Latina/o Studies and critical race scholarship more broadly, in order for students to become conversant in the theoretical debates that underlie the design of curriculum and classroom practice in Latina/o Studies at the undergraduate level. The course will incorporate some of the major lines of research in Latina/o Studies from different disciplines (such as History, Anthropology, Ethnic Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Linguistics) in order to address some of their most relevant discussions, internal critical debates, and major schools of thought. Students will also engage with other forms of cultural production, including visual culture, theater and performance, and music, among others. The seminar will provide graduate students a solid foundation in the development of a very timely and marketable research and teaching minor.

This course provides a broad exploration of translation in the Americas. In particular, it investigates the politics, practices, and theories of translation in Latin America and the United States from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, which allows for a comparative mode of reading across and between borders of language, nation, and region. The following questions will guide our readings and discussions over the course of the semester: How does translation unfold as a metaphor, a linguistic act, and a cultural experience in the Americas? To what extent do processes of translation inform the exchanges of languages, peoples, and cultures within and between nations in this region? The class examines the role of canonical Latin American writers as translators and scholars in order to underscore the centrality of translation to the production, circulation, and reception of Latin American literature. The course analyzes the contributions of Latin American writers, including José Martí, Brazilian modernists, Jorge Luis Borges, concrete poets Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Octavio Paz, and Julio Cortázar, to discussions of translation by reading their works on translation as theory and practice alongside key essays in translation studies by, among others, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, Lawrence Venuti, and Emily Apter. It also considers the importance of translators like Gregory Rabassa, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Elizabeth Bishop in disseminating Latin American literature within the United States. Building on these insights, students will consider the recent phenomenon of Latin American literature in translation and re-translation to recognize translation as a linguistic and aesthetic challenge governed by, in part, the political and economic demands of the global, literary market.

Major theories of literary criticism applied to Hispanic literature.

Creative projects, including nonthesis research, which are supervised on an individual basis and which fall outside the scope of formal courses.

This course will familiarize the student with psychoanalysis as a way to approach literature and culture. We will cover its basic concepts and structures, especially with regard to trauma and post-trauma. Most relevant will be: 1) witnessing and rendering testimony; 2) inherited or misplaced trauma; 3) responses to the father figure and paternalism. For all, but especially this last topic, we will consider parallels between the individual subject and the collective psyche: both the personal and the national, or the personal as national. For specific case studies/histories, we will draw on the Latin American and Latinx canon, from the Colonial period to the present. These may include El Inca Garcilaso, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Hernandez’s "Martín Fierro," caciquismo, the death of José Martí, Alfonso Reyes and his father, Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Cien años de soledad, the Dirty Wars of the 1970s, Rigoberta Menchú, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Theoretical readings will include psychoanalysis and trauma theory by Freud, Caruth, Felman, Laub, and on national identity by Benedict Anderson and Isiah Berlin.

This course will examine the validity, theoretical insights, and philosophical implications of various representations of the body and self in Spanish modernist thought and literature. It will also explore how the medicalization of culture affected debates surrounding the concepts of sexuality and gender.

This course explores the history, development, and cultural significance of photography in Latin America during the 19th century. Through a combination of lectures, readings, discussions, and hands-on activities, students will gain a deep understanding of how photography shaped perceptions of identity, culture, and society in the region.

This seminar will examine the construction of texts as products of cross-cultural encounters, texts that dialogue with the intellectual and aesthetic practices of the ancients and contemporary Italian humanists, with an emphasis on their visual and material productions. We also will explore libraries and museums as archives of knowledge for the creation of cultural memory. Space will be privileged as a stage for the construction and performance of the textual subject: a sacred space (a convent, a monastery, a chapel), an urban space, a pastoral space, and the space of the court. Space will also be studied as a repository, an archive of objects and artifacts—books, relics, ceiling paintings, urns, sculptures, tombs—some originating in Italy and the Low Countries, which were influenced by the political and ideological agendas of the Habsburgs. The course will be conducted in English. Readings will be in Spanish and English. Presentations, response papers, and the final essay may be written either in Spanish or English.

This seminar will consider the culture, politics, and ecology of the Amazon through a focus on how diverse groups of inhabitants and outsiders have viewed the region and the visual images and practices of visuality through which it has been mediated. Over the semester we will view films, photographs, paintings, and digital works, and we will read literary texts, ethnographic writings, and critical articles on a wide range of topics that will include the following: the use of traditions such as featherwork by contemporary Indigenous artists; Indigenous beliefs regarding minerals such as gold that lie hidden beneath the ground; opera and public festivals in urban Amazonia; GPS mapping projects involving scientists, conservationists, and Indigenous groups; the visual politics of state-led development projects and the construction of infrastructure linked to the extraction of natural resources; anthropological discussions of what is known as Amerindian perspectivism; and shamanic visions and ayahuasca tourism. Among the questions we will ask: What kinds of literary and artistic experimentation have arisen from the challenges of seeing and depicting Amazonia? How do different groups of Amazonians and outsiders conceptualize vision and its relationship to sound and other senses? Historically, what role have specific types of media technologies such as photography and film played in shaping ideas about the region? And how is the way we see the Amazon today conditioned by our increasingly keen sense of its ecological precarity? This class will be conducted in English, and all materials will be available in English. Students in SIP will be expected to use their knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese to access materials in those languages in the original.

This course focuses on feminist literary texts, including essays, poetry, narrative, and theater, from the Hispanic, Anglo, and French Caribbean, as well as their diasporas in the U.S. and Europe. We will begin by defining the Caribbean geographically, historically, and socio-culturally, and will proceed to study how feminism has been thought and practiced in the Caribbean in conversation with the rest of Latin America, the U.S., and Europe. We will analyze how the authors address diverse topics, including the roles of (non-) cisgender women in society, the suffragette movement, public health, labor and workers' rights, environmentalism, individual and collective sovereignty, race, gender, and sexuality, migration, and authorship/authority. Some of the questions that will guide our discussions will be: How can we define feminism as a philosophy and a practice in the Caribbean? How do Caribbean feminisms relate to their contextual specificities? For each text, we will also engage with its form and aesthetics and will explain how these aspects build a platform for the literary voice's politics.

This seminar will provide an examination of codeswitching (CS), drawing on corpus- and lab-based methods. We will attend to bilinguals' linguistic experience and community norms as impacting the cognitive representation of language and thus linguistic structure. We will address (1) linguistic concerns with constraints on CS by asking: Is CS favored at particular syntactic and prosodic junctures of the two languages? and (2) psycholinguistic concerns with the facilitation of CS by asking: Is CS predicted by "triggering" (either situational, e.g., by the interlocutor, or linguistic, e.g. by cognates)? Rather than assume that bilingual patterns need be derivable from syntactic principles for monolingual grammar, our goal will be to identify bilingual CS strategies--quantitative preferences to switch at particular sites and structural adjustments for switching at dispreferred sites. Students will present and evaluate published articles; learn to extract and code data from spontaneously produced CS; and conduct a pilot study toward an original research proposal.

This seminar examines the literary and cultural representations and repercussions of Latin America’s extractive economies. Letters, diaries, travelogues, and narratives from the colonial period through the nineteenth century crafted Latin America as a "marvelous possession" whose natural resources were to be controlled, extracted, and exploited for the benefits of elites. To explore how colonial, neocolonial, and neoliberal dynamics of extractive capitalism resonate within Latin American culture, this seminar will focus on commodities such as cotton, sugar, gold, coffee, water, and oil. At the end of the semester, we will move beyond these goods to consider culture itself as a commodity. Our discussions will draw on theoretical and critical readings from, among others, Héctor Hoyos, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Ericka Beckman, Charlotte Rogers, and George Yúdice, in dialogue with primary texts, including essays, novels, and films by Júlia Lopes de Almeida, Fernando Ortiz, Graciliano Ramos, Cristina Rivera Garza, Sebastião Salgado, and Lucrecia Martel.

As of around 2007, a majority of the world’s population is believed to reside in cities. Yet in the past couple of decades, Latin American literature and film have registered a renewed preoccupation with rural and “wild” locales such as jungles, the pampas, deserts, sierras, semi-urban periferias, and the Brazilian backlands, or sertão. At the same time, some geographers have started to question the urban/rural binary, arguing for the need to think about urbanization as a process that not only transforms more concentrated settlements, or “cities” (though what exactly is a city?), but also actively creates the hinterlands to which they are intimately linked. To gain some historical perspective, we’ll begin by reading two classic depictions of rural areas from earlier in the twentieth century: Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and Graciliano Ramos’s Vidas Secas (Barren Lives). The majority of the semester, however, will be devoted to novels, short stories, and films published or released in the twenty-first century, along with related theoretical and critical texts. Among the questions we’ll consider are: How have industrial farming and the intensification of natural resource extraction (re)shaped images of “non-urban” spaces? How do Latin American literature and film reflect and/or reject the tendency to treat nature as something that stops at the (often fuzzy) boundaries of the city? Given the long history of associating women and femininity with nature and rurality, has the increasing prominence of trans and non-binary identities impacted ideas about the rural/urban divide? This course is open to graduate students from any department. Almost all (if not all) of the works we’ll consider are available in English translation, though students in SIP are expected to read those in Spanish in the original and are encouraged to tackle the Brazilian works in Portuguese. The language of class discussions will be either English and/or Spanish, depending on the language skills of the students who enroll.

This course will examine various intellectual, social, and artistic formulations and uses of historical memory in contemporary Spanish culture, placing special emphasis on what has been called the memory "boom" (or, in more cynical corners, "industry") of the past quarter century. We will consider a rich set of materials—including documentary, fictional film, novels, drama, and graphic narrative—which have played no small role in catalyzing and informing Spanish society’s belated, if now vigorous, public reckoning vis-à-vis the traumas of the Civil War (1936-1939), the ensuing Franco dictatorship (1939-75), and the so-called "Pacto del Olvido" (the Pact of Forgetting) which characterized Spain’s arguably prolonged transition to democracy in the late 1970s, the 1980s, and even into the 1990s.

This course will examine the so-called decadent mentality and the notion of social and moral degeneration that followed the fin de siècle and the first few decades of the twentieth century.

This seminar will focus on a big question: What does it mean to be a writer? Specifically, we will concentrate on conceptualizations of "writing" as a practice of the body, and "body" as what shapes and is shaped by writing. Our examination of emotions and ideas associated with the intimacy involved in our craft will consider texts by a wide variety of authors, such as Roland Barthes, María Zambrano, Rosario Castellano, Reinaldo Arenas, Néstor Perlongher, Pedro Lemebel, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Cherríe Moraga, among others. At the same time, we will comparatively analyze forms of (de)mystifying writing in the European, American, and Latin American academia. We will experiment with our practice as we learn conventions that rule over different kinds of academic texts: abstracts, proposals, conference talks, articles, chapters, and books. For many of us, this experiment will also include a reflection of what it entails to constantly move between scholarly circles in different academic contexts. Readings for this class will be in Spanish and English. The class will be conducted in English.

This course reflects on attempts to conceptualize and visualize what we commonly call “nature” in areas of the world subject to the intense extraction of natural resources—whether this be the mining of minerals, commercial agriculture, or the harvesting of substances such as rubber. Our geographical focus will be on Latin America, though we will also occasionally consider other places as points of comparison, and we will read theoretical and historical works that take a comparative or global outlook. (Note that the course title borrows the concept of the “commodity frontier” from Jason W. Moore, whose “world-ecology” framework will be among the theoretical perspectives we consider.) Throughout the semester we will oscillate between two historical moments marked by waves of extractivism that put pressure on ideas about nature and related practices of representation: the late 19th and very early 20th centuries, and the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. Our questions will include: Why does capitalism seem to go through cycles when the “gifts of nature” play an especially pivotal role in the world-economy? How do such cycles spur—or how are they spurred by—new strategies and technologies for visualizing nature? What are the historical links between imperialism, colonialism, and extractivism? Are there ways to re-conceive the often negative consignment of women, Indigenous, and Black subjects to the realm of nature (and indeed, how have many women, Indigenous, and Black thinkers and artists already done so)? Our so-called primary texts will begin with selections from the voluminous writings that emerged from the Latin American travels of the German geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, whose conception of nature had an immense influence on subsequent scientists, writers, and artists. Throughout the rest of the semester we will examine geographical writings, fiction, painting, photography, films, other artwork, and maps by Latin American creators and others who had occasion to reflect on the “natural” world and resources they discovered in the region. Our path will be guided by several key visual concepts and categories, including Humboldt’s notion of the “physiognomy” of nature; landscape; chorography; mapping; and perspectivism and other Indigenous modes of envisioning alterity.

This seminar will consider late-nineteenth century Naturalism, post-Civil War Tremendismo, and Generation X "dirty realism" (or "blank fiction") of the 1990s—a triptych-like set of modern narrative sensibilities whose sordid reflections of/on the real thrust the genre of the Spanish novel beyond contemporary limits of good taste, while drawing on its foundations in the picaresque. Authors considered, by way of paired texts, will include: Emilia Pardo Bazán and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez; Camilo José Cela and Carmen Laforet; José Ángel Mañas and Lucía Etxebarría.

El presente seminario abordará la obra maestra cervantina desde una sensibilidad contemporánea, incidiendo en su contexto sociopolítico, histórico, filosófico y estético. Se tocarán aspectos relativos al desarrollo de la novela tanto formales (coherencia interna, elaboración de personajes, parodias en juego, referentes míticos y simbólicos) como ideológicos (sustrato humanista, trasunto biográfico, relectura imperialista). Las aportaciones del profesor situarán el texto cervantino dentro del momento en que se generó, haciendo especial énfasis en las coordenadas estéticas y las manifestaciones artísticas tanto del propio Cervantes como de sus coetáneos. Se anima al estudiante a disfrutar de las numerosas reescrituras tanto literarias como fílmicas del texto con el fin de aportar una mayor riqueza al debate. Los textos asignados en clase deberán ser leídos en su totalidad. La base del curso se estructura a partir de un close reading de la obra complementado con las correspondientes lecturas ancilares. Habrá varios trabajos escritos: presentaciones semanales y un ensayo de unas 20 páginas que se entregará al final del semestre. La evaluación final estará basada en la nota de las presentaciones y del trabajo final, además de la preparación y participación en clase. El profesor se reunirá con el estudiante para discutir el tema del ensayo no más tarde de la décima semana.

Este seminario mostrará que existen en la literatura española personajes y situaciones tan complejos y apasionantes como los que aparecen en la serie de televisión Juego de Tronos (Game of Thrones). Al igual que ocurre con el teatro Isabelino que inspira a George Martin, autor de los libros en los que la serie se basa, la Comedia Nueva española del mismo período tiene en el teatro histórico uno de sus principales géneros. El período medieval es el más representado en las obras de Lope de Vega y su escuela. Además de debatir el tema de la violencia y la cosificación de las mujeres en Fuenteovejuna, Reinar después de morir y El mejor alcalde, el rey, estudiaremos los prejuicios raciales y la diversidad cultural, que se tratarán en piezas como La judía de Toledo o El bastardo Mudarra.

In this seminar we will delve into the complexities and beauty of Calderón de la Barca's theatre, particularly prevalent on his most famous creation: La vida es sueño. La Vida es Sueño and the Theatre of Calderón de la Barca: Paradigm, Symbol, and Humankind on Stage. According to many specialists La vida es sueño is the best play of the Spanish Golden Age, and in Spanish literature it represents something comparable to Hamlet. As we will ascertain from the first sessions of the seminar, in La vida es sueño the fineness of the verses is not at odds with the philosophical depth, the richness of characters, and a quasi-perfect plot; indeed, all are features that Calderón developed throughout the rest of his production, a significative selection of which we will examine during the rest of the semester, including El alcalde de Zalamea, Amar después de la muerte, El gran teatro del mundo, El príncipe constante, La cisma de Ingalaterra, La dama duende, etc. When analyzing these plays we will start with their historical, political, and sociological context. After this, we will discuss how Calderón addressed the major themes of his time and to what extent his reflections on freedom, war, honor, violence against women, human nature, political power and its limits, assimilation of ethnic and religious minorities, tragic vs. comic, etc. are still valid. The seminar will also highlight the playwright's conception that theatre should first be staged and then read. For this reason, in every class we will engage in the analysis of the dramatic text (characters, conflicts, stage directions, etc.), watch clips of theatre performances of the plays we are reading, and discuss how theatre, cinema, and television professionals have approached both the dramatic wealth and the allegorical worlds of Calderón.

This course brings together research in sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and first and second language acquisition in order to prepare students to investigate how learners acquire and process sociolinguistic variation. The course will cover various corpus and experimental studies on the acquisition of variation and review how these studies inform models of L1 and L2 acquisition. The goal of the course is for students to draw from these various sub-disciplines of linguistics and create a project that integrates language variation and language acquisition.

This seminar explores theories and expressions of cosmopolitanism emerging from Latin America beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing through the contemporary moment. The class will consider how understandings of cosmopolitanism have changed in recent decades as Bruce Robbins, Pheng Cheah, and Homi Bhabha, among others, have embarked on a project of "new cosmopolitanisms." By following a more nuanced comparative perspective, this course recognizes that cosmopolitanism is no longer the privilege of the elites, but rather an experience shared with the poor and others. Latin American scholars Silviano Santiago, Mariano Siskind, and Ignacio Sánchez-Prado invite us to think about cosmopolitanisms in relationship to peoples, languages, and cultures often relegated to the periphery of world literary and cultural systems. In reading their theoretical interventions alongside philosophical texts by Immanuel Kant, Martha Nussbaum, and K. Anthony Appiah and literary works by Brazilian and Spanish American writers, this seminar proposes an investigation into the meanings and expressions of Latin American cosmopolitanisms. The following questions will animate course readings and discussions: How does a study of cosmopolitanism contribute to our understanding of the place of Latin America and its writers in the world? How do Latin American writers exude a desire for the world, which Siskind considers constitutive of cosmopolitanism? To what extent do Latin American cosmopolitanisms vary over time, in response to global geopolitical, economic, and cultural developments?

Since the nineteenth century, Latin American photography has generated a massive visual archive of great quality, powerful artistic practices and movements, and theoretical reflections. By focusing on the aesthetics associated with the exotic and picturesque as well as with modern photography, this seminar will examine how this form of art has been defined in practice and theory for more than a century now (since the 1850s). We will also look closely at a selection of materials that addresses challenges related to photo techniques and forms of reproduction; working with visual archives; dynamics of memory; national imaginaries; and photography as a mechanism of social control as well as of resistance. Additionally, we will analyze how these particular reflections on Latin American photography enter in dialogue with their specific local contexts and with a global artistic sensibility, impacted by "the age of mechanical reproduction" (Benjamin) and, more recently, the advent of virtual reality. Some of the photographers that will organize our discussions are Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Héctor García, Nacho López, Graciela Iturbide, Pedro Meyer, Silvina Frydlewsky, Daniela Rossell, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Enrique Metinides, and Gian Paolo Minelli, among others. Readings for this seminar will be mostly in Spanish and will be drawn from contemporary critical theory in art, philosophy, history, and popular culture.

This seminar explores the literary and artistic representations of Latin American and Iberian cities from their origins as imperial metropoles and colonial capitals through their transformations with nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban reforms and continued exponential growth. This class focuses primarily on cultural representations of Madrid and Lisbon as the centers of empire; Buenos Aires, Havana, and Rio de Janeiro as Belle Époque capitals; and São Paulo and Mexico City as global megapolises. We will consider how literary and artistic works can serve as alternative archives that document the rhythms of daily life, render the city as palimpsest, and, in the process, protest gentrification and other rapid changes. Readings from urban studies, architecture, anthropology, history, and other interdisciplinary fields will complement our literary and cultural analysis. Our discussions will draw on theoretical and critical readings from writers such as Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Le Corbusier, Adrián Gorelik, and Teresa Caldeira, in dialogue with primary texts, including essays, poems, short stories, photographs, and films by, among others, João do Rio, Mário de Andrade, Jorge Luis Borges, Tina Modotti, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Carlos Monsivais, Mariana Enríquez, and Mónica de Miranda. Readings will be in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Class discussion will be held in Spanish or English, depending on the preference of the class members.

Male heroism in the Caribbean has been associated with militarized bodies in open and direct confrontation against colonialism. Revolutionaries, but also martyrs, like Toussaint Louverture, Samuel Sharpe, Segundo Ruiz Belvis, or Ernesto (el Ché) Guevara are seen as true heroes in the archipelago and internationally. In this seminar, we will examine how writers, artists, and intellectuals have represented those figures, and others, from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first. We will also identify instances of weakness or imperfection, that is, when the hero or martyr ceases to be so. These moments will be key to our consideration of how vulnerability modifies heroism in the analyzed texts, images, films, and songs. We will complicate this discussion even further by considering representations of male anti-heroes, which in the Caribbean context refer to men who do not embody or perform masculinity according to a patriarchy built on colonialism and the colonizer/colonized interaction. Homosexuality or "weak" heterosexuality, non-cisgender men, disabled bodies, the mentally ill, idle men, and men posing to be culturally foreign are some examples of Caribbean anti-heroism. How do these representations interact with those of heroes? Would it be possible to trace a history of Caribbean anti-colonialism anchored in what colonial patriarchy has determined to be odious and deficient male bodies? How would this history look? What would it tell us about the future for decolonized islands? And about what a Caribbean "sovereignty" means? The seminar will work within a comparatist methodology, taking examples from the Anglo, Hispanic, and French Caribbean, as well as their diasporas in the United States and Europe, and paying attention to historic and cultural particularities in each context. We will work with materials in English, French, and Spanish and in translation, when available. Our theoretical framework will integrate ideas coming from feminism, gender and sexuality studies, and philosophical notions on coloniality and decoloniality.

Most humans can be considered speakers of two or more languages, but linguistic theory has generally attempted to explain multilingualism as a special case, implicitly viewing monolingualism as more fundamental. In this course we explore a different perspective, namely that human language is fundamentally variable, multivalent, and plural, or in other words, multilingual. Through readings of theoretical proposals and critiques of published work we will explore the implications of this perspective for our understanding of the nature of human language at the most basic level. Students will develop their thinking through short essays, responses to published work, and in course projects designed to advance our theoretical understanding of language through both exploratory data analysis and hypothesis testing, probing the cutting edge of this topic and developing their abilities to ground their empirical work in well-developed theoretical reasoning.

This seminar explores works of poetry and prose by religious writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century--San Juan de la Cruz, Teresa de Ávila, Luis de Granada, and Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza--and the role that pictorial images and artifacts played in the mystical experience, the materializing of visions, and questions of piety, identity, and politics. Art works will include paintings and statuary, psalter illuminations, altar pieces, and relics. Objects of Christological significance like polychrome sculptures of the crucifixion and Christ at the column of flagellation take center stage. We will pay special attention to the interweaving of vision, cultural memory, and sacred spaces. Carvajal will be privileged in this course, as we follow her from her early years living next to the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales in Madrid, as much a museum as a convent, to her final days as an activist in Jacobean England. We will study her letters and autobiography alongside her mystical poems. The course will be conducted in English. Readings will be in Spanish and English. Papers may be written in either Spanish or English.

This course will familiarize the student with psychoanalysis as a way to approach literature and culture. We will cover its basic concepts and structures, including the usages of Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. Most relevant will be: 1) witnessing and rendering testimony; 2) inherited or misplaced trauma; 3) responses to the father figure and paternalism. For all, but especially this last topic, we will consider parallels between the individual subject and the collective psyche—the personal and the national—including the personal as national. Readings will include theoretical and clinical texts by Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Caruth, Felman, Laub, and Abraham and Torok, as well as works on national identity by Doris Sommer, Benedict Anderson and Isiah Berlin. For specific case studies/histories, we will rely on a wide-ranging corpus drawn from the Latin American and Latinx canon from the Colonial period to the present. Discussion will be in English, and all readings will also be available in English.

This course will take a hemispheric approach to examining the connections between race, performance, and "possession"—a vexed concept that can refer to everything from property ownership to spirit possession. Over the course of the semester, we will explore the multiple meanings of this term and ask what it can tell us about the equally complex notions of "race" and "performance" by studying a diverse array of cultural phenomena from throughout the Americas (theater, performance art, films, literature, historical documents, music, etc.). For example: What sort of logical contortions were required to reconcile the fact that slaves—i.e., pieces of property—could speak, sing, dance, and even write or act? What is the link between the practice of spirit possession in many African-influenced religions and the histories of dispossession experienced by these groups? How might both instances of "possession" place pressure on liberal conceptions of subjectivity, and what can they tell us about the relationship between race and capital? Possible topics include: the exhibition of racially marked bodies and "scenes of subjection" (Sadiya Hartman); examples of racial impersonation such as blackface performance (what Eric Lott refers to as "love and theft"); slaves as objects of conspicuous consumption and the racialization of conspicuous consumption in the present; Haitian vodou, and links between zombies and whiteness in recent popular culture; avant-garde engagements with ritual practices of trance; struggles over copyright and cultural appropriation; and the politics of archives and museum collections. IMPORTANT: This course will be taught in English, with all materials available in the original (English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French) and in English translation. Students pursuing a degree in Spanish or French will be expected to read the original texts in those languages, and others with skills in these languages will be encouraged to do so as well.

Psycholinguistics is increasingly an important branch of linguistics, supported by the exponential growth of the use of experimental methods in linguistic research, to examine the cognitive processes underlying human language. In this seminar we will examine psycholinguistics through the lens of bilingualism. Bilingualism is of interest for a number of reasons. First, despite the prevalence of monolinguals in the United States, most people of the world are bilingual. To develop a truly universal account of human cognition, it is essential to gain a detailed understanding of the relationship between language and thought in individuals who speak and comprehend multiple languages. It will be essential that research on basic cognitive functions in bilinguals examine both the course and the consequence of second language acquisition. The primary goal of this course will be to introduce the core themes of psycholinguistics, using multilingual speakers as the case study. We will begin with issues concerning the acquisition of core linguistic levels, continue with lexical (e.g. how do multilingual speakers process cognates [piano] and false cognates [fin]?) and sentence processing (e.g. How do the two languages influence each other in predictive processing or when resolving syntactic ambiguity?), and finish with the cognitive neural consequences of bilingualism on general cognition, examining both production and comprehension throughout. A secondary goal for the course is to help students become familiar with current experimental methods used in psycholinguistic and increasingly in traditional linguistic research, e.g. self-paced reading tasks, syntactic priming, eye-tracking methodologies, EEG recordings, and fMRI.

This seminar focuses on the cultural and political function of sport in modern and contemporary Latin America. How do Latin American countries represent/portray themselves through sport? Do Latin American practices and representations of sport help articulate (or respond to) a distinctive idea of Modernity? By analyzing a wide range of cultural productions (literature, popular music, photography, movies, series, and documentaries), and sport practices and events (fútbol and football, boxing, baseball, lucha libre, running, Olympic Games, and World Cups), this course will provide an interpretative framework for understanding the enormous success of sport in Latin America and its larger role in the global economic and geopolitical landscape. Some of the topics that we will study are national formation, totalitarianism, globalization, body politics, heroes and antiheroes, sex, gender, and sexuality, leisure and productivity.

The myth of Don Juan has influenced the thoughts on seduction, erotic interactions, and gender roles for numerous authors and personalities from various times and countries. On the other hand, Don Juan has also been a symbol of rebellion against moral, social, and religious norms. In this course, we will explore the fundamental characteristics that defined the persona of Don Juan in the Spanish Golden Age period, where he was born, and how he was received during the romantic, modernist, and contemporary periods of Spanish literature and culture. We will examine the original elements of the character of Don Juan, place the myth within its social and historical contexts, and analyze the various dramatic and literary techniques used by playwrights, novelists, poets, artists, and filmmakers in creating the character of Don Juan. The course will examine the most influential versions of the myth, including Don Juan Tenorio by José Zorrilla and El estudiante de Salamanca by José de Espronceda. Additionally, there will be a focus on comedic reinterpretations of Don Juan by key authors of modern Spanish comedies, such as Enrique Jardiel Poncela, Pedro Muñoz Seca, and Miguel Mihura. Through laughter and insightful jokes, these authors emphasized the obsolescence of the womanizer masculine archetype at a time when women were becoming aware of their new role in modern societies. The resources to be studied will encompass drama, novels, poetry, films, paintings, music, performances, as well as academic, psychoanalytic, and philosophical essays.

There is now widespread recognition that most humans speak more than one language. This has contributed to increasing criticism of monolingual bias in linguistic theorizing and to the acknowledgment that a full understanding of the human language capacity must include multilingualism. In this course we will survey what has become a wide array of theoretical approaches to multilingualism, seeking to identify the major questions to be answered, and asking what kinds of data can help us answer them. In course projects, we will seek to advance our theoretical understanding through both exploratory data analysis and hypothesis testing.

The course provides an overview of topics and theories in second language acquisition (SLA), with a focus on the linguistic and cognitive aspects of learning a language during adulthood. The course will explore in depth the specificities of adult language learning (as opposed to L1 acquisition) through topics that include age effects, input processing, salience and attention, implicit/explicit learning, error prediction and feedback, social interaction, desirable difficulties, and individual-based differences. While most readings will be provided, students will be responsible for exploring a linguistic topic of their interest and for contributing additional papers. Students will be encouraged to build on previous and/or current interests and to pursue them within approaches to second language acquisition.

Usage-based approaches view linguistic knowledge as emerging from input experience and general cognitive mechanisms. This course explores second language learning and generalization, with a particular emphasis on the notion of constructions. By examining data from experimental methods and corpus linguistics, we will explore the question of how the distributional patterns of linguistic input affect the learnability of a second language. In problem sets, students will be introduced to essential skills for the computational analysis of text corpora (tagging; automatized extraction of n-grams, collocations, collostructions, etc.). Students will also complete an original project, analyzing the learnability of L2 constructions based on the quantitative analysis of linguistic data.

With the rise of Spain in the sixteenth century as a trans-European and global power, social, political, and aesthetic ideals were aligned with the court, empire, and modernity. This course will focus on how major poets of Habsburg Spain used artifacts as material sites of discourse to explore connections to antiquity, cultural memory, political and social events, space, self-representation, and status. Artifacts range from large decorative objects, like tapestries, paintings, and frescoes, to trinkets and accessories. The course will examine how objects are carriers of culture and history; how tapestries and paintings are used to explore questions of patronage, social networking, and gift-giving as well as to celebrate and critique the politics and ideology of empire; how mirrors and portrait miniatures are used for examining questions of introspection and self-reflexivity of an incipient modern subject; and how inscriptions on tombs and urns explore the interplay between orality and writing, voice and memory. The course will also deal with theories that subtend the production of texts: space, ruins, the city as text. Since the topic is part of a larger European phenomenon, the course will include Spain’s cross-cultural relations.

This course is designed to help students become active participants in the use and development of quantitative data analysis in the language science community. Students will gain familiarity with basic statistical concepts and techniques as well as more advanced techniques that are commonly used in our field. More importantly, students will consider the motivations behind researchers’ choices in how to analyze their data, by reading contributions to the growing literature on quantitative methodology in language science, critiquing published work, and conducting their own analyses of published and unpublished data. The goal is to equip students with the tools to both begin analyzing their own data, and to expand their knowledge by critically examining current practice, and assessing new developments in our field.

Young people have been at the center of political and cultural revolutions around the world and throughout history. For example, revolutions, urban movements, ethnic/racial pride, LGBTQ+, feminist movements, music bazaars, DJs and rave parties, and "barras de fútbol" are only some of the manifestations associated with young people in Latin(a/o) American literature, film, music, and journalism. Nevertheless, the concept of "youth" as an academic category only appeared in the 1960's. In this course, we will study different manifestations of youth cultures in the Hemispheric Americas, paying special attention to the Latinx communities in the U.S. and Latin America, since the 1960's and until the contemporary moment. The key question that will guide us is: How does each of these literary, artistic, and media representations of youth enter into dialogue with political events in which young people have been at the center of efforts to bring about political changes in the U.S. Latinx communities and Latin America? Using short fiction, film and documentaries, songs, blogs, and other cultural materials (YouTube clips, images, graffiti, etc.), we will identify and compare different youth cultures in Latinx communities in the U.S. and Latin America in terms of their productions, representations, and effects in the public sphere. We will enrich our analysis of primary materials with theoretical and critical readings that will help us to contextualize the different manifestations in our study.

A foundation in the field and strategies for teaching Latina/o Studies to undergraduates. This course provides a foundation in U.S. Latina/o Studies Literature and its contexts, with two separate but related goals. The first is to get a grasp on the U.S. Latina/o Studies canon that integrates humanities and social science approaches in order to analyze critical historical contexts that have shaped the emergence and evolution of the field of Latina/o Studies in U.S. higher education and academia, such as early colonial enterprises in the South and the Southwest, Spanish and U.S. imperialism, the Chicano and Young Lords movements during the 1960s, immigration patterns from the Caribbean and Latin America, government policies towards Latinos, contemporary rural and urban movements, etc. The second goal is to explore systematically pedagogical theories and practices in Latina/o Studies and critical race scholarship more broadly, in order for students to become conversant in the theoretical debates that underlie the design of curriculum and classroom practice in Latina/o Studies at the undergraduate level. The course will incorporate some of the major lines of research in Latina/o Studies from different disciplines (such as History, Anthropology, Ethnic Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Linguistics) in order to address some of their most relevant discussions, internal critical debates, and major schools of thought. Students will also engage with other forms of cultural production, including visual culture, theater and performance, and music, among others. The seminar will provide graduate students a solid foundation in the development of a very timely and marketable research and teaching minor.