Description: Provides practice in reading and analyzing culturally important works from across the Hispanic world. Includes a selection of genres and periods, from medieval Iberia to colonial Latin America to the global present. Emphasis on changes in the cultural phenomena, styles, themes, and ideological positions of literary texts.
I love teaching this course. We survey a broad and fascinating range of texts, from the medieval jarchas to the present day, stopping to consider the elegant humanist poetry of Jorge Manrique, smart and surly sonnets by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, disquieting stories by Jorge Luis Borges, and a cool and ironic album by Camilo Lara, alias Mexican Institute of Sound.
Description: Designed to develop awareness of linguistic styles and structures and emphasize the complex relationship between a language and its context. Taught as workshop, with regular assignments of texts for translation, comparison and evaluation. Selections from literature and general topics, although this is not a literature course. Attention given to theories of translation both past and present and how these theories respond to cultural and ideological perspectives; and relate to Spanish translation.
One of the most rewarding courses to teach, for me, but especially for my students. Confronting the challenges (and wonders!) of translation is one of the most impactful experiences most of my students have during their time at university.
Description: We will analyze and situate the work of Spanish pop singer Rosalía, a Grammy-winning global pop star from a small town outside Barcelona. Rosalía's music and videos blend reggaetón, medieval and Renaissance poetry, flamenco, trap, etc. Hugely popular, notably controversial, and increasingly prolific, Rosalía's work offers a unique site for thinking about pop culture, celebrity, artistic tradition, identity and globalization, and twenty-first-century media.
Special Topics courses (490) allow me and my colleagues to offer one-off treatments of interesting material. In this case, we analyzed Rosalía's entire production to date, reading her music, her videos, and her artistic trajectory critically against literary, musical, and dance traditions in a complex, globalized context.
Description: Across the Hispanic world, writers like César Vallejo, Federico García Lorca, Ruben Darío, Rosa Chacel, and Jorge Luis Borges, along with visual artists like Salvador Dalí, Maruja Mallo, and Pablo Picasso define what it means to be modern at the beginning of the twentieth century. This course examines and explores the complicated topic of modernity by surveying Hispanic art and literature from about 1898 to 1945.
It's great to teach this course, my bread and butter. Students very much enjoy it too, engaging critically with well-known writers and painters whose work they've perhaps heard of, but haven't really read closely with a solid theoretical framework.
Description: An historical panorama of the development of Spanish from late Latin on the Iberian Peninsula to the globally dynamic language of our present. Students will study the modern Spanish language in Europe, Africa, the Americas, and around the world, how this language came to be, and how it continues to change. Linguistic notions gleaned in this course have relevance to other modern languages, including English, as well as to the idiosyncrasies and common points of confusion in Spanish.
I have to step out of my usual literary wheelhouse to teach this course, but it's important and fascinating work. After thinking about some of the phonological processes of medieval romance, I make my students read some poetry in Latin and...they can parse a short text way faster and easier than they think! We talk about dialects across the Spanish world, how they came to be, students' perennial questions about voseo, etc.
Description: Develops fluency and accuracy in written and oral Spanish. Students help design course content through projects, performances, and problem-solving.
Always fun, we take on games, how-to workshops, short essays, mock cooking shows, video subtitling, and other exercises to iron out some points of confusion and polish written and spoken expression in Spanish.