Spanish Graduate Studies

Our graduate program offers course work in all the major periods and areas of Spanish and Latin American literatures, from medieval to post-Franco Spain, and from the Southern Cone of Latin America to the Caribbean and its diaspora. Students may also take courses in the different languages and literatures offered by our faculty and are encouraged to investigate interdisciplinary relations from a comparatist perspective.  They often participate in such programs as Caribbean Literary Studies, and the Center for Latin American Studies. All our students receive excellent training in the latest methodologies in second language acquisition.

Our faculty has particularly strong interests in literary theory, postcolonial studies, theater and performance studies, gender and queer studies, comparative and cultural studies. Their recent publications cover a broad range of topics, including medieval hagiography, the picaresque novel, Franciscan evangelization in New Spain,  Latin American modernisms, homosexual transgression in Brazilian poetry, Arab immigrant identity in Argentina, hybrid US-Cuban identities in performance art, and queer cultural transitions of Spain’s ‘la movida.’  

Current students are developing a range of innovative dissertation projects, including: Existentialism in 1930s and 1940s Latin American narratives, queer Latin American theater, anti-totalitarian street theater productions in Argentina, African women immigrants in contemporary Spanish fiction and film, and African women's presence and influence in Latin American culture.

Recent alumni hold appointments at a range of institutions, from community and liberal arts colleges to research-oriented universities, including University of London, SUNY-New Paltz, Indiana University, Saint Joseph's College (Long Island, NY), Notre Dame University, and Lewis and Clarke College.

 

Course work

Minimally, students complete at least one three-credit course in each of the traditionally defined areas of literary history, as well as introductory courses in theories of literary interpretation and Modern language teaching.  The seminars themselves, however, are not traditional surveys but rather innovative explorations of current theoretical and interdisciplinary work in their respective fields.  The recent course titles and descriptions listed below give some idea of the range of the curriculum.

Medieval Iberia

SPA611 Medieval Iberian Poetry

Golden Age Spain

SPA613 Don Quixote and the Theory of the Novel

SPA563 Love and Honor in the Spanish Comedia

Colonial Latin America

SPA553 Narratives of Domination, Hybridity and Resistance in Colonial Spanish America

SPA633 Writing Amerindian Otherness in Colonial Spanish America

19th Century Latin America

SPA555 Intertextualidad y Reescritura en el Caribe Hispano

SPA635 Literary and Social Authority among 19th-Century Women Writers

20th/21st  Century Spain

SPA556 Africa in Spain's Colonial and Postcolonial Imagination

SPA556 Canvas, Screen, Page and Stage:  Cross-Disciplinary Collaborations in the Early Twentieth-Century Spanish Avant-garde Movement

SPA616 Narrativa peninsular de los 40 y 50

20th/21st  Century Latin America

SPA636 Estética, política y ética: aproximaciones hacia lo irrepresentable

SPA636 Latin American Fictions and/as Theory

SPA636 Latin American Theater and Its Communities

SPA556 Indigenismos, indigenistas e indígenas:  política y representación

SPA636 Contemporary Latin American Narrative

Introduction to Literary Theories

MLL505 Literary Theories

Introduction to Foreign Language Teaching

SPA522 Spanish in the United States

MLL503 Theoretical and Research Foundations of Communicative Language Teaching

 

Additional courses may be required, depending on students’ backgrounds; students who have previously completed graduate course work may petition for a waiver of some course areas. In general, students have ample opportunity to elect additional courses according to their particular areas of interest. Recent elective offerings include:

SPA521 Modernismo y Generación del 98 (narrativa)

MLL621 Borders and Bridges: Insularism in the 20th Century French and Hispanic Caribbean

MLL605 Psychoanalytic Literary Theory: Duras, Faulkner, Garcia Marquez

POR591 Do romance romantico até a atualidade

POR591 Historia Cultural do Brasil

POR591 Estudos Culturais do Brasil: Musica e Sociedade