We tell stories for many reasons: to entertain; to seduce; to complain; to think. This course draws upon the literatures and cultures of the romance languages to explore the role of narrative in our construction and understanding of the world.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

Full details for ROMS 1102 - FWS: The Craft of Storytelling

What is a culture, and how do we know one when we see it?  This course draws upon the histories and texts of French, Spanish, Italian, and/or Portuguese speaking worlds to discuss issues of identity, difference, politics, place, and community.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

Full details for ROMS 1108 - FWS:Cultural Identities; Cultural Differences

What kind of information do images - in photography, painting, and/or film - convey?  What kind of impact do they have on the minds and the bodies of their audiences?  This course foregrounds the role of visual culture in the societies where Spanish, French, Portuguese, and/or Italian is spoken, and it asks students to dwell upon how visual material interacts with spoken and written language.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

Full details for ROMS 1109 - FWS: Image and Imagination

Some of the most important and intriguing thinkers, from the Middle Ages to postmodernity, have done their thinking in the romance languages.  This course explores a body of work that would be called philosophical by some, theoretical by others, and that, beyond these names, struggles to articulate fundamental concepts, problems, discourses, and situations.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

Full details for ROMS 1113 - FWS: Thinking and Thought

These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research.

Full details for ROMS 2750 - Introduction to Humanities

The Romance languages are the lasting imprint of all that happened to the Latin language as it moved through time, territories, and people of many ethnicities.  While the Latin of antiquity retained its prestige in high culture, the natural untutored usage of ordinary people was always free to go its own way.  This course covers the following topics, selected to create a panoramic view:  Formation of the general Romance seven-vowel system from Latin.  Early and widespread sound changes in popular Latin.  Finding and interpreting evidence for trends in popular Latin pronunciation.  The comparative method and its limitations.  Essential later sound changes, some of which ceate a whole new order of consonants unknown to Latin but conspicuous in Romance.  Nouns and adjectives from Latin to Romance.  Formation of the present indicative: the competing forces of sound change and analogical adjustment.  A brief overview of Portuguese.  Variants of the seven-vowel system.  Salient features of Romanian.  Factors that helped shape the vocabulary of Romance.  Medieval diglossia.  Emergence of Romance vernaculars newly recognized by their speakers as languages distinct from Latin and from each other.  Close analysis of the oldest surviving document written unmistakably in Romance (842 C. E.).

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for ROMS 3210 - History of Romance Languages I

At the end of the Great War, Europe has became the realm of a new relationship between violence, culture, and politics. From 1914 to 1945, the continent became the realm of an extraordinary entanglement of wars, revolutions and counterrevolutions, civil wars, and genocides, which could be summarized by the concept of "European Civil War". This course will analyze some features of this cataclysmic time by engaging political theory, cultural and intellectual history, and by scrutinizing novels, films, and intellectual productions.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for ROMS 3300 - The Culture of Violence: Europe 1914-1945

The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' – the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes– to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of "capitalist ruination" which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ROMS 4334 - Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries

This course combines literature, film, and other artistic projects in order to explore African forms of collective justice and repair, following the numerous conflicts that have shaken the continent in the 20th and 21st centuries, from anti-colonial struggles to civil wars. We will look at aesthetic productions from post-independence Algeria and Ghana, post-apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda, among others, in order to reflect on multiple questions, including: How do aesthetic works and state institutions offer competing narratives of a traumatic past, and what ways of healing can they generate? How do they negotiate between the retributive and the restorative impulses of justice? Is justice sufficient for resolution to take place? And conversely, can repair ever be achieved in the absence of justice?

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ROMS 4681 - Post-Conflict Justice and Resolution in Africa

Part epistemology and part experimental humanities, this seminar looks at improbable encounters between the divergent regimes of thought and knowledge expressed by "literature" and the "sciences." Our main concern is not the literary thematization of the scientific, nor is it an exploration of science fiction as a genre. Our reflexive focus is rather on the noetic and poetic transfers different modes of textuality could unfold, beyond their hiatus in terms of writing, apparatus, signification, and mental experience. Readings include scholars such as Foucault, Kuhn, Strabo, Haraway, or Hayles, and writers such as Homer, Rousseau, Shelley, or Borges. Several discrete disciplines, such as geometry, cognitive science, botany, primatology, or AI, could be analyzed. The seminar is also linked to the research activities of the Humanities Lab.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, ETM-AS)

Full details for ROMS 4825 - Literature and Science: Transfers in Poetics and Epistemology

Focuses on language teaching as facilitation of learning, thus on the learner's processing of language acquisition and the promotion of reflective teaching. Pedagogical approaches will be addressed from a learner-centered perspective involving effective language learning strategies and analysis.

Full details for ROMS 5070 - Methodology of Romance Language Learning and Teaching

This course calls into question the public use of history. The past is permanently mobilized according to the culture and the problems of the present. Over the last decades, "memory" - a general concept used as a synonym for remembering, history, imagination, or representations of the past - arose at the heart of the public sphere, becoming an object of struggles.  In some historical circumstances, the past is suddenly "reactivated" and irrupts in the present by claiming its "rights," the end of oblivion, and rescue of the vanquished.  Considering some well-known controversies about slavery, colonialism, fascism, communism, civil wars, the Holocaust, etc., the course aims at exploring how collective memories are interwoven with cultural industry, public policies (museums, commemorations, laws, etc.), and history writing.

Full details for ROMS 6225 - The Politics of Memory: Uses of the Past

The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' – the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes– to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general  horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of "capitalist ruination" which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.

Full details for ROMS 6334 - Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries

This course combines literature, film, and other artistic projects in order to explore African forms of collective justice and repair, following the numerous conflicts that have shaken the continent in the 20th and 21st centuries, from anti-colonial struggles to civil wars. We will look at aesthetic productions from post-independence Algeria and Ghana, post-apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda, among others, in order to reflect on multiple questions, including: How do aesthetic works and state institutions offer competing narratives of a traumatic past, and what ways of healing can they generate? How do they negotiate between the retributive and the restorative impulses of justice? Is justice sufficient for resolution to take place? And conversely, can repair ever be achieved in the absence of justice?

Full details for ROMS 6681 - Post-Conflict Justice and Resolution in Africa

Part epistemology and part experimental humanities, this seminar looks at improbable encounters between the divergent regimes of thought and knowledge expressed by "literature" and the "sciences." Our main concern is not the literary thematization of the scientific, nor is it an exploration of science fiction as a genre. Our reflexive focus is rather on the noetic and poetic transfers different modes of textuality could unfold, beyond their hiatus in terms of writing, apparatus, signification, and mental experience. Readings include scholars such as Foucault, Kuhn, Strabo, Haraway, or Hayles, and writers such as Homer, Rousseau, Shelley, or Borges. Several discrete disciplines, such as geometry, cognitive science, botany, primatology, or AI, could be analyzed. The seminar is also linked to the research activities of the Humanities Lab.

Full details for ROMS 6825 - Literature and Science: Transfers in Poetics and Epistemology

FREN 1210-1220 is a two-semester sequence. This is the second half of the sequence designed to provide a thorough grounding in French language and an introduction to intercultural competence. French is used in contextualized, meaningful, and critical thinking activities to provide practice in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Development of analytical skills for grammar leads students toward greater autonomy as language learners. Students continue developing their writing skills by writing and editing compositions. Readings are varied and include literary texts and a short novel.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 1220 - Elementary French

FREN 1230 is an all-skills course designed to improve oral communication, listening comprehension, and reading ability, to establish a groundwork for correct writing, and to provide a substantial grammar review. The approach in the course encourages the student to see the language within the context of its culture.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 1230 - Continuing French

This intermediate conversation and composition French course is designed for students interested in business fields such as Hospitality, Business Management, and Marketing, those looking for an internship or a job in French-speaking businesses or students interested in exploring the language and cultures of the French-speaking business world.  The course will focus on improving oral and written skills through the acquisition of specific vocabulary and the review of essential grammatical structures commonly used in business.  Students will use authentic written, visual and listening materials and engage in interactive activities relevant to the professional world and its intercultural dimension.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 2080 - French for Business

This intermediate-level course is designed for students who want to focus on their speaking and writing skills. Emphasis is placed on strengthening of grammar skills, expansion of vocabulary and discourse levels to increase communicative fluency and accuracy. The course also provides continued reading and listening practice as well as development of effective language learning strategies.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 2090 - French Intermediate Composition and Conversation I

This advanced-intermediate course is highly recommended for students planning to study abroad as it aims to develop the writing and speaking skills needed to function in a French speaking university environment. A comprehensive review of fundamental and advanced grammatical structures is integrated with the study of selected texts (short stories, literary excerpts, poems, articles from French periodicals, videos) all chosen for thematic or cultural interest. Students write weekly papers, participate in class discussions of the topics at hand, and give at least one oral presentation in class.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 2095 - French Intermediate Composition and Conversation II

This course, designed to follow FREN 2095, introduces students to an array of literary and visual material from the French and Francophone world.  It aims to develop students' proficiency in critical writing and thinking, as well as presenting students with the vocabulary and tools of literary and visual analysis.  Each section of FREN 2310 will have a different focus-for example, colonialism and the other, or the importance of women and sexual minorities in French and Francophone history, performance in literature and film, or image and narrative-but all sections of FREN 2310 will emphasize through writing assignments and in-class discussions, the development of those linguistic and conceptual tools necessary for cultural and critical fluency.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, FL-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for FREN 2310 - Introduction to French and Francophone Literature and Culture

This course designed to follow FREN 2095, introduces students to key cinematic techniques used in analysis of films and to major movements in the twentieth century French cinema.  Students will view a broad range of French and Francophone films spanning from 1945-2004 that includes canonical as well as contemporary works.  Topics studied include: the evolution of gender representation in French and Franophone films, the depiction of decolonization, and the films de banlieu genre.  The class will combine discussion, presentations, class scene analysis and readings from journalistic and film criticism texts, and will be conducted in French.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS) (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 2320 - Introduction to French and Francophone Film

Throughout Western history, the nature of melancholy (aka "depression," its modern counterpart) has both inspired and baffled philosophers, doctors, artists, and writers. Compared to other ailments, affects, or conditions, this mysterious sadness has provoked a proliferation of concepts, theories, therapies, and artworks. This seminar offers a comparative survey of discourses on melancholy/depression and their related ideological, social, aesthetic, and scientific issues, from the Ancient Greeks onwards. We will focus on the ways in which melancholy/depression has been theorized in medicine, theology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, ethnography, philosophy, and ecology; on how its shifting forms are related to issues of politics, society, culture, race, and gender; and on the many modes through which it has been file and expressed in literature, visual art, music, and today's social media.

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS) (KCM-AG)

Full details for FREN 2550 - From Black Bile to Digital Depression:The History of Melancholy in Medicine, Philosophy, Art, Media

In this course, both seminar and workshop, students discuss writing about translation, mostly in French, and practice translating from French to English.  The theoretical texts studied represent a variety of perspectives and the French texts translated, a variety of literary and non-literary genres.  Students will investigate ways of addressing various types of difficulties they encounter in the process of translating across languages and cultures with the aim of developing their own principled approach to translating.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 3160 - Translating French: Theory and Practice

This course is designed to teach ways of reading and understanding works created from the Romantic period to the present day, in their cultural context. A range of texts from various genres is presented, and students refine their analytical skills and their understanding of various methodologies of reading. Texts by authors such as Balzac, Baudelaire, Cixous, Duras, Genet, Mallarmé, Michaux, Proust, Rimbaud, Sarraute, and Sartre.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 3210 - Modern French Literature and Culture

In the age of smartphones and social media, it's a cliché to say that the competing claims made on our attention only seem to be multiplying. But a cliché can be true. This course is an opportunity to enact certain practices of attentiveness and concentration, drawing largely from religious, literary, artistic, philosophical sources. We'll be trying to slow down our normal critical processes, to suspend the appropriative, pragmatic, and goal-oriented nature of much of the modern university. Through various exercises, from memorizing poems to immersing ourselves in our surroundings to reading about the ways in which our senses reach out to the world, we'll try to make ourselves more attentively available to that world.

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS) (KCM-AG)

Full details for FREN 3540 - On Paying Attention

What makes religious violence so intractable, and what has fostered the continuity of this form of conflict over such a long span of time? What is the role of aesthetics in literary descriptions of such horrific violence? Violence as a spectacle raises the question of personal responsibility, making those who observe it complicit even if they do not participate in it. Texts to be considered will include Maalouf's Les Croisades vues par les arabes. Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné's Les Tragiques, René Girard's La Violence et le sacré, Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz et après, Shoshana Felman's and Dori Laub's work Testimony, Gillo Pontecorvo's La Bataille d'Algers, Franz Fanon's Les Damnés de la Terre, Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, ETM-AS) (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 3730 - Religious Violence in French and Francophone Literature

This course examines a range of exciting and provocative 20th- and 21st- century theoretical paradigms for thinking about literature, language and culture. These approaches provide differing, though often overlapping, entryways into theoretical analysis, including structuralism and post-structuralism, translation studies, Black studies, Afro-Diasporic Studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, gender studies and queer studies, studies of the Anthropocene/environmental studies, and animal studies. Occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (D-AG)

Full details for FREN 3921 - Literary Theory on the Edge

This course examines how writers, filmmakers, and content creators from Africa engage with and revise public images of bodies—specifically pleasure, queerness, sex strikes, etc. Our inquiry also surveys theorists' commitment to highlighting forms of self-fashioning and agency/responsibility in addition to troubling problematic tropes of pathologization and excess. These topical explorations will be achieved through analyses of storytelling, digitality, the aestheticization of violence, and social change theories. Through contemporary films, digital platforms, novels, and essays, we will reflect on the precarious yet empowering nature of the body. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentations) and deep attention to analysis and writing (reaction papers, an abstract, an annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you refine your understanding of body politics.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for FREN 3975 - Body Politics in African Literature, Cinema, and New Media

Guided independent study of special topics.

Full details for FREN 4200 - Special Topics in French Literature

This seminar will explore some of the most important psychoanalytic approaches to politics and collective life. from Sigmund Freud's Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego to works by Le Bon, Reich, Althusser, Fanon, Lacan, Safouan, Zizek and Dolar. Questions explored will include the relationship between mass and individual psychology; the role of unconscious identification (ideal ego, superego) in group formation, nationalism, xenophobia and racism; fantasy and politics; and the people considered as a subject and political actor. Events and contexts discussed will range from the French Revolution to the Nazi Reich to colonialization and contemporary authoritarianisms. Works of political theory by Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Arendt, Balibar and Ranciere will be put in dialogue with psychoanalytic readings.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS) (CA-AG)

Full details for FREN 4240 - Psychoanalysis and Politics

This course studies philosophical, literary, and scientific conceptions of "nature" and the ethics and politics of human-nonhuman relations.  We will cover a wide array of texts and global issues-such as animal cruelty, indigenous ecological thought, climate justice, plant ecologies, and ecological sovereignty-while trying to trace a history of French and Francophone ecological thought, from the 16th century to today.  Our readings will address a number of related questions: what is our responsibility to nonhuman beings?  How must our conceptions of nature, humanity, ethics, and politics change to become more ecological?  And are these issues contemporary or have they been with us for centuries, even millennia?  Students will closely study and collectively discuss texts while undertaking assignments ranging from the analytic to the experimental.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for FREN 4250 - Ecological Thinking: Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics Beyond the Human

A number of well-known French novels have been adapted, appropriated, and reimagined, giving them a life well beyond France and beyond the time in which they were produced. We will explore how one novel can serve various, sometimes contradictory, purposes in different times and cultures by examining the context in which it was written, the text itself, and the variations that have arisen over time.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 4265 - One French Novel

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for FREN 4300 - Honors Work in French

The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' – the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes– to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of "capitalist ruination" which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for FREN 4334 - Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries

Part epistemology and part experimental humanities, this seminar looks at improbable encounters between the divergent regimes of thought and knowledge expressed by "literature" and the "sciences." Our main concern is not the literary thematization of the scientific, nor is it an exploration of science fiction as a genre. Our reflexive focus is rather on the noetic and poetic transfers different modes of textuality could unfold, beyond their hiatus in terms of writing, apparatus, signification, and mental experience. Readings include scholars such as Foucault, Kuhn, Strabo, Haraway, or Hayles, and writers such as Homer, Rousseau, Shelley, or Borges. Several discrete disciplines, such as geometry, cognitive science, botany, primatology, or AI, could be analyzed. The seminar is also linked to the research activities of the Humanities Lab.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, ETM-AS)

Full details for FREN 4825 - Literature and Science: Transfers in Poetics and Epistemology

This course calls into question the public use of history. The past is permanently mobilized according to the culture and the problems of the present. Over the last decades, "memory" - a general concept used as a synonym for remembering, history, imagination, or representations of the past - arose at the heart of the public sphere, becoming an object of struggles.  In some historical circumstances, the past is suddenly "reactivated" and irrupts in the present by claiming its "rights," the end of oblivion, and rescue of the vanquished.  Considering some well-known controversies about slavery, colonialism, fascism, communism, civil wars, the Holocaust, etc., the course aims at exploring how collective memories are interwoven with cultural industry, public policies (museums, commemorations, laws, etc.), and history writing.

Full details for FREN 6225 - The Politics of Memory: Uses of the Past

The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' – the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes– to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general  horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of "capitalist ruination" which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.

Full details for FREN 6334 - Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for FREN 6400 - Special Topics in French Literature

Part epistemology and part experimental humanities, this seminar looks at improbable encounters between the divergent regimes of thought and knowledge expressed by "literature" and the "sciences." Our main concern is not the literary thematization of the scientific, nor is it an exploration of science fiction as a genre. Our reflexive focus is rather on the noetic and poetic transfers different modes of textuality could unfold, beyond their hiatus in terms of writing, apparatus, signification, and mental experience. Readings include scholars such as Foucault, Kuhn, Strabo, Haraway, or Hayles, and writers such as Homer, Rousseau, Shelley, or Borges. Several discrete disciplines, such as geometry, cognitive science, botany, primatology, or AI, could be analyzed. The seminar is also linked to the research activities of the Humanities Lab.

Full details for FREN 6825 - Literature and Science: Transfers in Poetics and Epistemology

This introductory course provides a thorough grounding in all the language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing, with practice in small groups.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for ITAL 1110 - Elementary Italian In Rome I

This is a fast-paced, introductory course designed for students with some basic knowledge of the language. This introductory course provides a thorough grounding in all language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing, with practice in small and large groups. Interactive lectures cover grammar and cultural information.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for ITAL 1202 - Italian II

The learning objectives of this course are, first, to introduce students to some of the crucial moments in the history of Italian figurative arts, architecture and fashion design, but also to a range of social issues relevant for understanding the more recent tendencies in art and design in modern Italy; second, to help students refine the way they speak and write about art, architecture and design through a review of the grammatical and lexical structures of Italian and a reinforcement of idiomatic expressions that will increase their ability to discuss, evaluate, analyze and compare issues of relevance to the field of art, architecture and desgn.

Full details for ITAL 1213 - Italian for Art, Architecture and Fashion Design

An intensive elementary Italian language course. This 6-credit course covers material presented in ITAL 1201 and ITAL 1202 in just one semester. It's offered to students who cannot study Italian in the Fall, but can only do it in the Spring semester.

Full details for ITAL 1401 - Intensive Elementary Italian

An intermediate-level course that aims to further develop intercultural, reading, listening, speaking, and writing abilities in ITAL 2201. Students will be guided in perfecting their communication skills, improving their cultural proficiency, and developing a critical eye toward printed and visual material drawn from literature, history, politics, science, and arts in the Italophone world. Conversation skills will be practiced in daily discussions and in individual or group projects and presentations. A variety of written assignments will help students increase the range, accuracy, and stylistic appropriateness of their writing. Review of select grammar topics is part of this course, as is reading a short contemporary novel.

Full details for ITAL 2202 - Italian IV

In this film and culture course dedicated to Italian cinema, we will be looking at and reflecting on some of the most important films that made history both in Italy and the world from the end of the World War II to today.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ITAL 2204 - The Cinematic Eye of Italy

This course is dedicated to studying important works of literature that address what it means, in the Renaissance, to strive for excellence as a man or as a woman, especially in the public sphere and in love.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ITAL 3580 - Creating Renaissance Man (and Woman)

Guided independent study of special topics.

Full details for ITAL 4200 - Special Topics in Italian Literature

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for ITAL 4300 - Honors in Italian Literature

This course calls into question the public use of history. The past is permanently mobilized according to the culture and the problems of the present. Over the last decades, "memory" - a general concept used as a synonym for remembering, history, imagination, or representations of the past - arose at the heart of the public sphere, becoming an object of struggles.  In some historical circumstances, the past is suddenly "reactivated" and irrupts in the present by claiming its "rights," the end of oblivion, and rescue of the vanquished.  Considering some well-known controversies about slavery, colonialism, fascism, communism, civil wars, the Holocaust, etc., the course aims at exploring how collective memories are interwoven with cultural industry, public policies (museums, commemorations, laws, etc.), and history writing.

Full details for ITAL 6225 - The Politics of Memory: Uses of the Past

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for ITAL 6400 - Special Topics in Italian Literature

Second semester introduction to the Lusophone (Portuguese speaking) world.  Emphasis is given to the development of language skills (e.g., speaking, listening, reading, and writing), as well as the appreciation and awareness of Global Portuguese-speaking cultures, prompting students to make comparisons to their own culture.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for PORT 1220 - Elementary Portuguese II

This is a course designed to intermediate students to enhance their oral and written communication skills in Portuguese while engaging a broad range of topics related to Afro-Luso-Brazilian culture. Along with the textbook, students will read a short-essay book, be exposed to a number of films and critically reflect and discuss the films and readings. Students will continue to build their knowledge on grammar and vocabulary as well as Global Portuguese culture and language diversity.

Full details for PORT 2020 - Intermediate Portuguese for Spanish Speakers II

This course provides an introduction and overview of Brazilian culture. It will study different periods of Brazilian history, through the analysis of films, literature, essays, visual arts, and music. Students will explore different definitions of Brazilian identity and "Brazilianness" focusing on key topics including the formation of the colonial Brazil and the emergence of the nation of Brazil as a tropical paradise; slavery and abolition; the particularities century; and the contradictions of the modernization process throughout the 20th century. We will consider elements of Brazilian popular culture such as Carnival, Samba, and "telenovels," and some of the most important cultural movements of the 20th century, such as "Modernismo," "Cinema Novo," and "Tropicalia." The primary objective of the course is to provide students with the relevant background to understand Brazilian cultural history.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for PORT 2800 - Perspectives on Brazil

While building language proficiency and accuracy through communicative activities, the course encourages students to actively interact with one another. The instructor facilitates communication and provides feedback and language learning strategies that guide students to take responsibility of their own learning and become active participants in the process. The course also introduces students to the many peoples and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world, prompting them to make comparisons with their own culture. Additionally, lectures provide students with opportunities to reflect on relevant grammar topics and assist students in developing language learning strategies. Class discussions are conducted entirely in Spanish. After 1220, students may take SPAN 1230, SPAN 2070, or SPAN 2090 depending on their LPS score.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 1220 - Elementary Spanish II

SPAN 1230 is the third course in the Spanish language sequence. It is designed to help students progress from the "novice high" level to the "intermediate mid" level in speaking, listening, reading and writing.  The course is structured around four thematic units: fashion and art; the natural world; personal relationships; and health. In each unit, we will learn the vocabulary and grammar constructions that are necessary to talk about the unit's topic. Particular emphasis will be placed on the skill of giving and defending opinions. Throughout the semester, we will discuss and analyze a wide variety of art from the Hispanic world, including songs, fashion, visual arts, TV shows, films, performance art, newspaper articles, documentaries, film shorts and podcasts. The overall goal of this course is to develop students' ability to comprehend authentic materials in Spanish and formulate nuanced opinions about those materials.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 1230 - Continuing Spanish

This low-intermediate course expands Heritage students' confidence and competence in Spanish by providing opportunities to build upon the conversational skills they have. Through literary texts, other readings, music, films and the visual arts students broaden their vocabulary, improve grammatical accuracy, develop writing skills and enrich their understanding of the cultures of the Spanish-speaking world. The heritage student grew up speaking Spanish and finished high school in the U.S. 

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 1250 - Spanish for Heritage Speakers I

This innovative course focuses on basic oral communication in Spanish. Emphasis is placed on developing speaking and listening skills and strategies in a culturally relevant context. It is intended for students with limited or no knowledge of Spanish and active class participation is required.

Full details for SPAN 1502 - Conversational Skills for Spanish in Global Contexts

Designed to expand bilingual Heritage students' knowledge of Spanish by providing them with ample opportunities to develop and improve each of the basic language skills, with a particular focus on writing vocabulary. The heritage student has at least one parent of Hispanic origin and grew up speaking Spanish at home; s/he also finished high school here in the US. After this course, students may take SPAN 2095.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 2000 - Spanish for Heritage Speakers

Provides a conversational grammar review, with dialogues, debates, compositions, and authentic readings on health-related themes. Special attention is given to relevant cultural differences and how cultural notions may affect medical care and communication between doctor and patient. The objective of 2070 is to provide practice in real-life application, such as taking a medical history, calming a patient, and how to speak to a Hispanic patient in a culturally acceptable manner. After this course, a student may take or SPAN 2095.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 2070 - Intermediate Spanish for the Medical and Health Professions

This intermediate course develops accurate and idiomatic oral and written expression in a cultural context. Students achieve a higher level of syntactical and lexical competence through reading and discussing literary texts and viewing films. Particular emphasis is on writing and editing academic essays with peer/instructor feedback. Classes are in Spanish and the language is actively used in oral presentations and communicative, creative, and critical-thinking activities. Students review grammar structures on their own, with clarification and support of the instructor. After this course, students may take SPAN 2095.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 2090 - Intermediate Spanish I (Composition and Conversation)

This advanced-intermediate course is designed to prepare students for study abroad and is required for any Cornell CASA program in a Spanish speaking country.  It also serves as an entryway into the major, and advanced-level courses. Students study stylistics, analyze and discuss texts, view films, and acquire advanced reading strategies. Continued emphasis is on writing and editing academic essays with peer and instructor feedback. Classes are in Spanish, and the language is actively used in oral presentations and communicative, creative, and critical-thinking activities. Students review grammar structures on their own, although the instructor may clarify as needed.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 2095 - Spanish Intermediate Composition and Conversation II

This advanced course will focus on spoken Spanish in its formal and informal registers, regional dialects, and pronunciations.  Authentic texts from across different genres of film, newspapers, fiction, songs, and essays will be used to develop all skills with emphasis on oral production, as well as intercultural and pragmatic competence.  Students will further their fluency and accuracy by engaging in activities that might include debates, oral presentations, and interviews.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 2130 - Advanced Spoken Spanish

Introductory survey of modern Spanish literature. Students develop their analytical skills and learn basic literary concepts such as genre (drama, lyric, short story, and novel) and style (romanticism, realism, etc.) as well as male/female perspectives and the translation of literature to film language. The survey introduces students to Spain's cultural complexity through readings of works by authors representative of its diverse linguistic and literary traditions.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS) (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 2140 - Modern Spanish Survey

Readings and discussion of representative texts of the 19th and 20th centuries from various regions of Latin America. Among the authors considered are Sarmiento, Hernández, Martí, Darío, Agustini, Cortázar, García Márquez, Poniatowska, and Valenzuela.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, FL-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SPAN 2150 - Contemporary Latin American Survey

This course explores major texts and themes of the Hispanic tradition from the 11th to the 17th centuries. We will examine general questions on literary analysis and the relationship between literature and history around certain events, such as medieval multicultural Iberia, the creation of the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century and the expulsion of the Jews in 1492; the encounter between the Old and the New Worlds; the 'opposition' of high and low in popular culture, and of the secular and the sacred in poetry and prose. Readings may be drawn from medieval short stories and miracle collections; chivalric romances, Columbus, Lazarillo de Tormes, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, among others.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 2170 - Early Modern Iberian Survey

This course, which is required for the major, is designed to help the learner develop increased accuracy and sophistication in writing in Spanish for academic purposes and continued oral practice in Spanish. To this end, there will be ample writing and revising practice, with a focus on specific grammatical and lexical areas, customized to the needs of the students enrolled in the course.  All writing will be based on a particular theme relating to Latin America with a focus on film, literary texts, newspaper readings and conducting an interview.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 2180 - Advanced Spanish Writing Workshop

Interdisciplinary course offered every spring. Topics vary by semester, but readings always focus on current research in various disciplines and regions of Latin America. The range of issues addressed include the economic, social, cultural, and political trends and transitions in the area. In the weekly meetings, instructors and guest lecturers facilitate student discussions. Students taking the course are required to participate in all class discussions and write a research paper in their chosen focus area.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 2200 - Perspectives on Latin America

Interdisciplinary course offered every spring.  Topics vary by semester, but readings always focus on current research in various disciplines and regions of Latin America. The range of issues addressed include the economic, social, cultural, and political trends and transitions in the area.  In the weekly meetings, instructors and guest lecturers facilitate student discussions.  Students taking the course are required to participate in all class discussions and write a research paper in their chosen focus area.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 2205 - Perspectives on Latin America in Spanish

This course examines the history of Chile from the 1700s to the present, always with an appreciation for its place in a broader world but always also with attention to its regional and national specificities and its links to the Pacific. Lectures will be paired with readings from various genres: fiction, poetry, journalism, manifestos, speeches, historical monographs, and short stories.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for SPAN 2715 - A Global South: Chile, the Pacific and the World

This 1-credit optional course aims to expand the students' vocabulary, and advance their speaking and reading skills as well as enhance their knowledge and deepen their cultural understanding by supplementing non-language courses throughout the University.

Full details for SPAN 3020 - Spanish Language Across the Curriculum (LAC)

This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SPAN 3335 - Border Environments

From portraiture to landscape, from the urban to rural, from the monumental to the mundane, this course explores Spanish photography, studying a range of artists and styles - formal, experimental, documentary, abstract, conceptual - between 19th century and the present.  At the heart of weekly discussions will be some key foundational questions: What is photography?  What is Spanish photography? How does one read a photograph?  What does photography, a supposedly visual medium, have to do with language, textuality and writing? What are different theories of photography?  This course is conducted in Spanish and designed for a diverse group of students, including those who already are familiar with the language of photography as well as those who have never studied photography before.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SPAN 3570 - Spanish Photography

As globalization draws the Americas ever closer together, reshaping our sense of a common and uncommon American culture, what claims might be made for a distinctive, diverse poetry and poetics of the Americas? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what convergences and differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Pound, Stein, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Bolaño, Césaire, Nourbese Philip, Hong, Long Soldier, Rankine, Lamar, Kaminsky, and Xie.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SPAN 3800 - Poetry and Poetics of the Americas

This course explores how the vocabulary (words like price and credit), structure (such as one of loss and gain), and ropes of medieval (and early modern) Spanish fiction speak to the emergence of different economic figures, reading texts from the 13th through the 17th centuries may include Poema de mio Cid, ibro de Apolonio, Yida de santa Maria Ogipciaca, Libro del conde Lucanon, poetry by Quevedo and Gongora, etc. and critical texts by Mauss, Derrida, Shell, Bataille, and others.

Full details for SPAN 4060 - Medieval Literary Economics

Guided independent study of special topics. For undergraduates interested in special problems not covered in courses.

Full details for SPAN 4200 - Special Topics in Spanish Literature

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for SPAN 4300 - Honors Work II

As Latinx studies continues to expand beyond its nationalistic origins and re-examines its geographical bounds, nuancing the role of borders within the field becomes urgent. This course probes at the primacy of the border in Latinx studies by centering Caribbean waters. As a liquid that refuses to succumb to the violence of fragmentation and instead embodies iterations of radical wholeness, water has an innate capacity to "undo" borders, a quality epitomized by the Spanish verb "desbordar" (to overflow). Through discussion and analysis of key Latinx cultural products we will gain an appreciation for the multiple ways in which water sustains provocative contradictions across borders regarding representations of historical memory, gender and sexuality, migration, race, and religion and spirituality, among others.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS)

Full details for SPAN 4577 - Desbordando: Reading Caribbean Waters in Latinx Studies

This course provides an introductory overview to environmental thought in Latin America and the Latinx diaspora. We will discuss pre-Columbian approaches to the nonhuman and colonialism's transformative impact on ecosystems in the hemispheric America's. We will then turn to contemporary debates about whether nature should be treated as a resource or as a commons, with special attention paid to Indigenous philosophers like Ailton Krenak, Latinx scholars like Laura Pulido, and visual artists like Laura Aguilar and Carolina Caycdo.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SPAN 4690 - Latin American and Latinx Environmentalisms

This course examines Latin American literature in the context of the visual and auditory of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, in which mass media such as photography, film, and the Internet have threatened writing's "representational privilege" as a technology of information processing and storage. We will analyze how literature has been able to sustain its visibilty in the competitive media ecology: the power of mass media fantasies to mold the individual's subjectivity, and of the visual image to manipulate reality; the relationship between literature and popular culture and the market place: and the young writers' engagement with the new technologies of the information age.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SPAN 4910 - Latin American Literature: Mass Media

This course explores how the vocabulary (words like price and credit), structure (such as one of loss and gain), and tropes of medieval (and early modern) Spanish fiction speak to the emergence of different economic figures, reading texts from the 13th through the 17th centuries, and critical texts by Mauss, Derrida, Shell, Bataille, and others.

Full details for SPAN 6060 - Medieval Literary Economics

This course calls into question the public use of history. The past is permanently mobilized according to the culture and the problems of the present. Over the last decades, "memory" - a general concept used as a synonym for remembering, history, imagination, or representations of the past - arose at the heart of the public sphere, becoming an object of struggles.  In some historical circumstances, the past is suddenly "reactivated" and irrupts in the present by claiming its "rights," the end of oblivion, and rescue of the vanquished.  Considering some well-known controversies about slavery, colonialism, fascism, communism, civil wars, the Holocaust, etc., the course aims at exploring how collective memories are interwoven with cultural industry, public policies (museums, commemorations, laws, etc.), and history writing.

Full details for SPAN 6225 - The Politics of Memory: Uses of the Past

This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.

Full details for SPAN 6335 - Border Environments

Guided independent study for graduate students. For graduates interested in special problems not covered in courses.

Full details for SPAN 6400 - Special Topics in Spanish Literature

Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students—really, all humanists…okay, all writers—find to be the greatest struggle: "Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite." Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.

Full details for SPAN 6590 - Methods in Medieval

This is a graduate survey course of Latin American poetry from the Popol Vuh until today.  We will simultaneously study the construction of a poetic canon - major works, figures, and movements - and deconstruct it, examining popular productions, genre-defying works, and poetry in non-European languages. Guiding questions include: How does poetry in Latin America understand itself?  How does poetry in Latin America conceive of its role vis-à-vis society, politics, and literature more broadly?  Alongside figures such as Vallejo, Mistral, Sor Juana and Neruda, but also the anonymous author of the Apu Inka Atawallpaman.  Mapuche poet Daniels Catrileo and the singers of cielitos in the Southern Cone, we will ultimately ask: what is poetry after the invention of Latin America?

Full details for SPAN 6880 - Latin American Poetry and Poetics